Jumping into the deep end in Baghdad

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 in 2003 they would lounge by the hotel pool, 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 public attire. Just last week, the Iraqi parliament debated the morality of coed swimming, a U.S. State Department official said.

Given that 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 aqua water or, if men are splashing around, avert our eyes. After dark sometimes, we creep down with friends and strip to one-piece swimsuits under long pants to swim a few laps. If men are eating on the deck near the deep end, they usually stare.

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 gowns I wear here? No. Maybe they wore the full-coverage swimsuits I had seen in the U.S., 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 gowns, carrying a bag full of swimsuits, caps, earplugs and an inflatable pool toy shaped like a tire.

At the hotel, we followed stairs up to a long, carpeted corridor leading to the pool, passing under an ornate wooden archway that still featured a sign from olden days warning swimmers not to forget their membership cards.

After paying an entrance fee of 10,000 Iraqi dinars each, about $8, we were in.

We stepped into a locker room labeled “ladies,” but it seemed abandoned, so we headed for the room marked “gentlemen” in English and Arabic. 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 chlorine smell of public pools in the U.S.

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 grayish, nearly opaque, probably because of all the chlorine. It made me think of recent cholera outbreaks in the capital and the spread of polio through U.S. public pools in the 1950s.

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 makeup 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 clamoring 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 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 from Baghdad in a T-shirt-swimsuit combo who said she used to work for the U.S. Army. This was her first trip to the pool, she said. She had brought her mother-in-law, who also spoke English, explaining that she learned it from American movies.

“You don’t have pools like this in the U.S., right?” said the young woman. 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-aged mother. Maybe U.S. 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 tightly around my head.

As we emerged into the dry heat of the afternoon, my co-worker was frowning. I knew she had been worried that if I wrote about the pool, conservative Shiite politicians allied with anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada 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.

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com