IRAQ:Baghdad is an increasingly restrictive place, as Molly Hennessy-Fiskefound when she went for a women and children-only swim
When one of my Iraqi co-workers invited me to go swimming the other day, I wasn't sure what she meant. Sure, we have an outdoor swimming pool at our hotel, but it's pretty much off limits to us - we're women.
It hasn't always been this way. I've heard stories from other female reporters about how they would lounge by the hotel pool in 2003, drinking beers and taking afternoon dips as helicopters buzzed overhead. And Baghdad once had at least a dozen public pools where men and women swam together.
But Muslim religious leaders have clamped down on women's attire. Just last week, the Iraqi parliament debated the morality of co-ed swimming.
Given that political environment, in the interest of modesty, most women don't use the hotel pool during the day.
Instead, we walk past, draped in scarves and ankle-length tunics, and stare longingly at the rectangle of water or, if men are splashing around, avert our eyes. After dark sometimes we creep down with friends, strip to one-piece swimsuits under long pants in order to swim a few laps.
But my co-worker wasn't talking about our pool. She explained that Tuesdays are "family day" at the pool in the Babylon Hotel.
Women and children only. No men.
"Do the women wear head scarves?" I asked. No, she said, of course not.
What about abayas, the ankle-length tunics I wear here? No. Maybe they wore the abaya-style swimsuits I had seen in the US, spandex body suits with matching head covers? No again.
"I know," she said, "I couldn't believe it myself." And then she really shocked me: "Some of them even wear bikinis."
I imagined a pool deck full of Iraqi women reclining in two-piece suits, slipping on enormous sunglasses and sipping Diet Pepsis. I could just picture the eager men craning their necks from hotel windows above to get a look. An island of female liberation in the increasingly restrictive capital. I had to see it.
So on Tuesday, we drove over wearing our head scarves and tunics, carrying a bag full of swimsuits, caps, earplugs and an inflatable pool toy.
At the hotel, we followed some stairs up to a long carpeted corridor leading to the pool. After paying an entrance fee of 10,000 Iraqi dinars each, about €5, we were in.
Inside, a woman wearing a black T-shirt over a black one-piece swimsuit was helping her two sons change on the cracked tile floor. The place had the same dingy water and chlorine smell of public pools in the US.
My mood lifted as we shed our head scarves and I watched my co-worker emerge in a tankini-style flowered two-piece, shaking out her short hair.
"I feel free," she said, smiling.
But as soon as we emerged from the locker room, my fantasy ended.
First of all, it was an indoor pool - no terrace, no deck chairs, no reclining beauties. The pool water was greyish, nearly opaque, probably because of all the chlorine.
Not nearly as inviting as the pool I'd imagined, or even the hotel pool.
But as I stepped over to the edge, a young woman immediately surfaced next to me in a neon green two-piece suit. I noticed she also wore a gold necklace and rings, long black hair pulled back into a ponytail and heavy eye make-up miraculously intact.
Come this way, she said, and took my hand, leading me to a set of stairs in the shallow end. My co-worker followed.
The water was cool, the crowd of about 20 people welcoming. Soon we were surrounded by young women clamouring for attention from the tall, pale American and her friend. Some wore T-shirts over modest swimsuits, others low-cut, strappy two-piece suits - revealing, but nothing like the bikinis I'd pictured.
They all had questions: Where were we from? Did we speak Arabic? Could we go underwater? Could we swim to the deep end?
I showed them I could, doing the strong crawl I learned back in summer camp. One woman, awed, confided to my friend that she had thought I was lying.
Most of them said they didn't really know how to swim. So they stuck to the shallow end or inched their way along the pool walls.
Boys in swim goggles cannonballed beside them. Little girls in Barbie swimsuits abandoned their water wings, then scampered out of the water to reclaim them.
Several women introduced themselves in English, including a young woman in a T-shirt-swimsuit combo from Baghdad who said she used to work for the US army. This was her first trip to the pool, she said. "You don't have pools like this in the US, right?" the young woman asked. I had to agree.
Suddenly, my co-worker whispered in my ear. She had overheard one of the women talking about me in the shallow end. It was the woman we had seen in the locker room, the woman in black.
"She thinks we are with the army," my co-worker said. "She said: 'There are the American invaders and the bitches that help them'."
I looked toward the shallow end. The woman had her back to me, but I caught a glimpse of her profile. She looked like a middle-age mother. Maybe US troops had searched her house, or detained her husband, I said. My co-worker promised to complain to the pool manager. I told her not to.
All at once I became very aware that I was the only American in the room, the only American I had seen on the way into the hotel. Most of the women I had talked to said they had never seen an American at the pool before. "Probably because they don't think it's safe," they said.
We kept swimming, but I was uneasy. A few minutes later, my co-worker reported that the woman in the shallow end was getting angrier.
"She is saying: 'If I have my way, they will not leave the hotel today'."
So we got out, gathered our bags and retreated to the locker room. I showered and changed quickly, throwing on my coverings, tying my pale blue head scarf tight around my head.
As we emerged into the dry heat of afternoon, my co-worker was frowning. I knew she was worried that if I wrote about the pool, conservative Shia politicians allied with anti-US cleric Muqtada al-Sadr might try to close it down. But other co-workers had dismissed the possibility, and that wasn't really what upset her.
"I feel you are not really with me, that you didn't enjoy yourself," she said.
She was right. I felt refreshed, my skin cool and clean. But the female-only island of calm I came looking for didn't exist. In Baghdad today, conflict reaches into even the most private of spaces. There is no escape. - ( LA Times-Washington Post service)