Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 7

  I imagined people treated like animals for years—ignored when they kept their heads down, kicked when they straggled out of formation, expected to wag their tails for a pat on the head. And now every last system was gone, and smothered humanity exploded, unbound, over a grid of cracked infrastructure teeming with testy American soldiers. I rubbed the grit from my eyes and watched. Men and women boiled raw, hitting against each other, free to react in dangerous compounds.

  I rolled down the window, got a lungful of dust, and sank back, coughing.

  The lobby of the Palestine Hotel swelled with life, a dim womb packed with bodies and drained of electricity. The elevators were dead, and so were the phones that called up to the rooms. I was supposed to find John, the Los Angeles Times correspondent who’d been there through the war. He’d arranged accommodations for us. I found his room number on a hand-scrawled registration log and climbed up the dark stairs, along hot caverns of corridors. I knocked on the door, and nobody came. So I decided to take a walk, to write down some notes. Dust still blotted out the world, biblical and sobering, scattering locusts, foretelling the plague.

  Marines had surrounded the hotel and sealed off the side roads. Beyond the checkpoints and razor wire, masses of Iraqis swarmed. They had come for help, sniffing around for jobs, or to stand and glower at foreigners. Everything had collapsed, and there were Americans inside the hotel, so they clumped as close as they could get and stared, looking for clues to the new Iraq. The Iraqi army had melted away like wax brushed against a flame. Saddam was on the run. They had been left to their own devices.

  I waded into that crowd with a notebook, looking for an English speaker to hire as a temporary translator. I couldn’t get a question out of my mouth before they pounced on me and closed in, ranting.

  “All the world was putting its hands on its eyes when Saddam killed us. Why now? Where is the food? Where is the medicine?”

  “They’ve been fifty years in London, drinking and eating. They don’t represent the Iraqi people. We want somebody from here, who suffered with us.”

  “Bush wanted to make this a civil war. They make no safety. They intend to. They know everything.”

  “Iraqi people, we know nothing about democracy. Until now we’ve had a knife over our head by Saddam Hussein.”

  It was all there: the tortures of the past; the irritable chaos of the invasion; every woe that was about to crash down. At the time, these rough men in their sweat-stained clothes sounded paranoid. I would soon interview professors and merchants who were less aggrieved and more reasonable, who sounded more correct, predicting that security would soon return, that early spasms of violence were just a mob reaction to sudden, total change. These were comforting things to hear; they matched what U.S. officials seemed to expect. Many of those merchants and professors are gone now, dead or fled. The vision of the mayhem to come was in the collective howl of the street, among people who’d learned to expect nothing. The poor people were the ones who got stuck there, and they were the ones who saw it coming. Strung out on sleeplessness and adrenaline, I was clobbered by the first wave of a feeling that kept coming back for days: that it was all a mistake, that none of us should be there, the soldiers or aid workers or me. It was all a misunderstanding, and now we were lost abroad and the Iraqis were lost at home, and from this chaos absolutely anything could be born.

  I stayed out too late that night. I got stuck on the streets after dark, and had to find my way back to the little hotel where I was to sleep. I barely remembered where it was by daylight, and now there didn’t seem to be a lightbulb burning in the entire city. The sandstorm had thrown a gritty blindfold over the stars. My stomach began to twist.

  “There’s a curfew,” a marine warned me as I moved past a checkpoint, an American voice in the dark. “You shouldn’t be out on the streets.”

  “I don’t have any choice,” I told him. “I have to get back to my hotel. It’s right up the road.”

  “Be careful out there.”

  I waded into night, and the lights buried themselves behind me. In this absolute darkness, the human enterprise of pharmacies, pavement, and mosques seemed like folly, cardboard things thrown together in denial of their flimsiness. A darkness like that overpowers everything. War comes studded with darkness, power outages and shadows and dark roads. But I never saw anything as black as that first night in Baghdad.

  I smelled bodies passing unseen: the rotten tang of sweat; the heavy sag of flesh. Over the roar of blood that rushed and crashed through my veins, I imagined I could hear the thoughts of criminals snake past. When a person had crazy eyes, my mother would say, “If he were a horse, they would shoot him.” The streets of Baghdad were like that, except instead of seeing a glimmer of madness, you could taste and breathe and brush against it. Crazy pressed in on all sides, jabbered in gunfire, chafed every sense. The whisper of sleeves, pants, stitch on stitch, weave on weave. The glance of skin against fiber, hairs pricked up and throbbing, and even the stir of air, pushed in currents by breath and bodies and fear. The sandstorm churned the sky overhead. Danger gelled in the streets like floodwater; I swam through it, breaststroking through mud, and all the time my heart was throbbing.

  If I disappear in this dark, they will never find me.

  I don’t know how I got back that night. One foot before the other. I groped my way to the corner, and remembered to turn left. Even now, writing about it, I am nervous. My heart picks up and my pupils grow wide. The notebooks look ancient to me. The writing is forgotten. After I turn the pages, I drop the books and wash my hands with soap, as if I have touched an infection, and watch the water slip off down the drain.

  We stayed in a little dive called the Swan Lake, its lobby plastered with whimsical pictures of gondolas and swans. There was no security, only an old man with an AK-47 who slept like a street bum, sprawled across the doorway. I stepped over his old bones without rousing him. My eyes felt wild in the stab of light.

  Gunfire popped in the street all night. Brushing my teeth, I imagined them shooting their way into the hotel. There was nothing to stop them. Every ill-intentioned man in Baghdad ran wild in the streets below. I slept anyway on the hard bed. Fell silently into black and dreamless slumber, quick and melting, a sugar cube dropped into hot tea.

  We drove away from a burned-out museum on a heavy, dank afternoon, and as we slipped toward the Rasheed Bridge, I glanced idly over. “Stop here, stop!”

  They were digging fresh bodies from the dirt of a scabby little park. Nurses in paper masks clambered in and out of trenches, bringing up the dead. The park stretched parallel to the Tigris, tapering off at the gates of Saddam’s palace. Some diehard Iraqi soldiers had dug trenches and made a last stand here, firing their guns against the American tanks.

  “I talked to them,” one of the neighbors told me. “I said, ‘Run away, because nobody should kill himself for Saddam Hussein.’ But they refused. They said, ‘We will fight the Americans here.’”

  When the battle was over, the neighbors said, U.S. soldiers had wrapped the dead in body bags, dumped them down into the soldiers’ trenches, and bulldozed the earth back over them. But the graves were shallow, and after a few days the stink of decaying flesh rose from the ground, winding around the houses like lace.

  It’s hard to misunderstand the stink of death. If it gets into your nose, you know what it is. The body knows; the nerves know. Something like rotting vegetables or spoiled meat, except there is an awful note of metal. Now the smell poured out of the earth as if they had drilled a hole into the rotten heart of the war itself. The volunteers wiped at their eyes, hoisting the heavy flesh from hand to hand, laying the bodies onto orange stretchers. The smell drew young boys; they pulled their T-shirts over their noses and squatted at the rims of the trenches, as close as they could get, staring down. The old men stood a little farther off, muttering. The nearness to death fixed their faces in masks. Even the little boys were silent beneath widened eyes. Everybody stood and watched as the eart
h relinquished its bodies. American tanks groaned past on the road toward town, sightless beasts with bigger troubles to attend to. The wind changed; the neighbors clutched rags to their faces and gagged.

  A quiet spring afternoon spread itself over the riverbanks, exploding in brassy sunlight. Shadows stretched themselves long under the palms, and purple flowers burst over a bullet-pocked fence. War stained the landscape like streaks of rust. Bomb-singed buildings rose. Birds wheeled in the sky overhead. Stone women posed with their upturned jugs, frozen, pouring air perpetually into the green waters of a decrepit fountain. Teenagers cruised by in an antique car they’d stolen from Saddam’s palace. A stray dog trotted to the edge of the park and sniffed the air, caught the reek of death and turned tail. Rocket launchers lay in the grass like forgotten toys. The neighbors were afraid to touch them.

  “What else could they have done, eh? At least they had the decency,” one of the neighbors told me. He was a forty-year-old Iraqi-British banker, come home at this most unpropitious time to take care of his father, who’d had a stroke. His name was Haytham; he’d been trapped in Baghdad through the weeks of war.

  “There’s a few hand grenades lying around. My nephew picked one up the other day. These kids haven’t got a clue, they just think it’s an amusement park.”

  A baby camel hoofed the earth nervously in a penned garden outside Haytham’s house, blinking at us. He had escaped from the presidential palace up the road, presumably from the menagerie kept by the cruel and capricious Uday Hussein. Nobody knew what to do with him.

  “It’s a lovely camel, isn’t it?” Haytham said, and grinned. At our backs, the workers went on, digging the dead from the dirt and piling the bodies into trucks.

  Down at the children’s hospital, the staff had dug up the rose gardens to make room for the nameless dead, and tacked a list of identified corpses to the door. Families crowded forth, looking for missing sons, for young army recruits who’d gone off to do their duty in the twilight hours of a cracked and collapsing regime. Some had been killed. Some were taken prisoner. There were no cell phones, no landlines—no way to know anything. The Iraqis could only drag themselves around the city, find one person after the next, and ask. We were all stripped of technology, reduced to our ancient selves, to faces found and words spoken in person.

  A man stopped me at the gate. He had driven with his brothers all the way from the southern city of Karbala. His eyes were rimmed with red, his mustache sagged. They were looking for their twenty-nine-year-old brother, who had deserted the army in southern Iraq and caught a ride to Baghdad with a buddy. His brother talked to me slowly, carefully, staring into my face as if I might conjure the truth if only he got all the details straight.

  “My brother was seen somewhere around Baghdad on the fifth or seventh, but he never returned home,” he said quietly. “If he was a prisoner, where would he be?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “God willing he’s a prisoner of war, rather than a dead body,” the man muttered. His eyes skimmed on, probing the hospital yard. The three brothers spread out, moved slowly around the fresh mounds, stepped around the empty holes, squatted to read the descriptions tacked up on stakes. If this were still a garden, the hand-scrawled placards would list a variety of rose or thyme. Instead, the cards announced the kind of body that had been planted:

  “Republican Guard,” one of them read. “Tattoos on hand: ‘Ahmed, you are my brother,’ ‘You’re my life, Haidar.’”

  “Unknown soldier. White trousers and brown checked shirt.”

  “Girl, 2–3 years. Wearing yellow and red dress, white vest.”

  The bodies came and went fast. At first the staff had segregated the Muslims from the Christians; the Iraqis from the other Arabs. But it had gotten too complicated; by now, the dead were jumbled.

  A group of men hoisted a body into a crude wooden crate and headed for the road with the makeshift coffin on their shoulders. “There is no God but God,” they chanted. Their blank eyes betrayed only fatigue.

  “We try to reduce the fear and shock out of them, to ease the shock when they find the bodies,” one of the volunteers, a slight young man in a white coat, told me. “We don’t break bad news to them right away. We remind them to have some faith, he might be alive. Even if we know he’s dead, we don’t tell them straight off.”

  “That sounds cruel,” I blurted.

  “We are dealing with thousands of families,” he bit off the words. “We couldn’t even walk into the freezers, they were so packed with bodies.”

  The desire to get out of Iraq broke over me like hunger. I felt revolted. The story line of the news reports—a dictator toppled; the hunt for weapons of mass destruction; the officials in Washington wearing suits and uniforms and congratulating themselves on Operation Enduring Freedom—what did any of that have to do with the waste of these families, trawling in the chaos for one particular person? The invasion was a nasty, impersonal force, and people had been walloped. And me, pretending I could encapsulate it all in a few paragraphs, grabbing a quote from this victim or that, scribbling scraps of description.

  The families were still coming, pushing for a better look at the handwritten inventory:

  “Man wearing khaki trousers and shirt.”

  “Age 50–60. Balding.”

  “Wristwatch in reception for identification.”

  The driver swerved through the clots of Baghdad traffic, pressing toward the Catholic church. Sunday is a working day in Muslim countries, and the streets clanged with heat, dust, and machines. But this was Easter Sunday, and I was going to Mass. I stepped into the shadows of the church, crossed myself, and headed up the aisle. Among primped and perfumed Iraqis, I was self-conscious in dusty jeans and a stained cotton shirt. On my knees, I rattled off a silent Act of Contrition. When I was a child, I was instructed to say this prayer on my deathbed, told that the admission of sin and regret would cleanse my soul and usher me straight into heaven. And so I had learned to say it faster than how-much-wood-would-a-woodchuck-chuck, convinced the words would deliver me from purgatory, but only if I could push them out in time.

  Oh-my-God-I-am-sorry-for-my-sins-in-choosing-to-sin-and-failing-to-do-good-I-have-sinned-against-you-and-your-church-I-firmly-intend-with-the-help-of-your-son-to-make-up-for-my-sins-and-love-as-I-should-Amen.

  I said it a few more times. Then I sat and tried to imagine my family. They would still be sleeping. My mother would go to church in a few hours, and she would sit scared, praying for me. She had been alone since my father died four years earlier. I had waited until the last minute to tell her I was going to Iraq. I had called her from the hotel in Amman, just a few hours before I drove over the border. She had said, “Oh my God,” and her voice broke. I remembered being at church with my mother on a Sunday morning. One of her friends said, “Well, every time I feel sorry for myself because my kids are in another state, I think of your poor mother.”

  I had come to church because I wanted to sit someplace that felt like home. Like St. Paul’s, with its enormous stained-glass saints and the one pane darker than the others since the long-gone day when a boy threw a snowball through it after catechism class. We had stood with frozen feet and gaped at the awesomeness of his transgression.

  We dyed eggs every year on Easter Sunday, punched a hole at the fat end of the egg, pricked the thin end with a needle, and blew them hollow. My father whipped all those raw eggs, chopped potatoes, and cooked Spanish tortillas. He knew how to drop a little oil into the dye so that the colors came out swirled, churning, like the sky over the sea. The firehouse on Main Street sold spring plants to raise money for the firemen: lilies, grape hyacinths, tulips. The spice of the bright blooms, the cool press of earth, the wet greenery packed in the cement depths of the firehouse. You breathed it and knew the long winter was over. I remembered the smell as Mass droned on in Arabic.

  The hymns had the same swooning wail as Muslim muezzins. Rendered in Arabic, the prayers were unrecognizable, t
he sermon a glaze of language. I tried to feel some holiness seeping off the worshippers, but I couldn’t feel anything. Only the press of madness outside, in the streets and the country beyond. In my head I chanted the rosary, clinging dumbly to the words.

  As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be.

  Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

  SIX

  THE LIVING MARTYR

  The Shiite pilgrims walked south into the first sun. They had been marching for days, from the south and from the north, past the palm groves and abandoned battlefields and farms. They came in cars and trucks and buses, too, the women squeezed into flatbeds, veiled heads bent together. They clotted the road, choked our path, and we eased the car into the space they left. We had driven out of Baghdad in the dark, glided south as blackness melted into dawn and villages shook themselves from slumber. When traffic tangled the car, we climbed out and walked with the pilgrims.

  “This is incredible,” I kept saying to Raheem, the translator.

  “Yes,” he beamed. “It is.”

  A thirteen-year-old boy doggedly pushed his crippled brother in a wheelchair. Old men crawled along the road until their knees bled. Villagers sprayed water over the pilgrims’ heads to cool them; stirred cauldrons of tea and vats of rice; offered spigots to rinse their feet. Holy men clambered onto cars and serenaded passing crowds with passages from the Koran. When time came for prayer, men spread their rugs in the road and bent their heads to the earth.

  We were tracing the path of the American invasion in reverse, and war still littered our way: stray cluster bombs, blasted craters, and burned-out cars framed the road. Nobody cared. They were going to Karbala, not slinking or sneaking, but proclaiming themselves all down the country’s main highway. After the U.S. invasion, this was the first move Iraq’s Shiites made: they marched en masse to Karbala, to the tomb of Imam Hussein, the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. They marched because the time had come in their religious calendar, because tradition and faith demanded it. They also marched because, for the first time in recent memory, they could. They had woken up to find themselves the unfettered majority. Saddam Hussein, tormentor of the Shiites, was gone. Now every Shiite wanted a taste of a pilgrimage that had been outlawed under Saddam, and so they walked those country roads, roaring out all that had been suppressed. Not just marching, but announcing themselves, showing the Sunnis, showing the Americans, showing the world—we are here. In its free-wheeling ecstasy, the outsized worship of a saintly man, the pilgrimage was closer to a Catholic procession in Mexico than anything I’d seen the Sunnis do in Afghanistan or Gaza. The saucer-eyed portrait of Imam Hussein hung everywhere, pasted on car windshields and hoisted in thick frames. His face against a flaming sky; his body punched by infidels’ arrows, burning eyes on a field of green. Hussein died on the plains of Karbala in AD 680, and Shiites have punished themselves ever since for abandoning him to his enemies. Every year, his martyrdom is mourned for forty days; afterward, Shiites march to his tomb and deliver themselves back to life through torments of the flesh.