The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  Wataniya was a kind of civics class. The syllabus explained citizens’ duties, the structure of the government, the constitution, the authority of the police and the administrative divisions of the country. It also taught the duties of students: arriving on time, showing respect to teachers, taking care of the furniture and in particular, cleaning the portrait of the President which was hung in every classroom. In 1979 the face of President Bakr was taken down and replaced with the face of his usurping cousin, the self-promoted Saddam Hussein.

  Saddam Hussein was the Baathie strongman and Vice President with an increasing portfolio of key controlling positions in the army, the Party, and the Security Services. With his tribal connections to the President and his inner circle, he effectively controlled the four pillars of the Iraqi state. He made sure he was the most visible politician in the country, always on TV, smiling, handsome, charismatic, well-tailored suits, polished shoes, mirror sunglasses. He would sweep into provincial towns in a black Mercedes cavalcade and emerge to cheering crowds of blushing young female university students and proud-backed Baathie Youth cadres, dispensing charm, gold watches, oil nationalization, agrarian reform. In the fat years of the seventies teachers salaries were increased, schools were repaired and built and stocked with expensive foreign equipment. In Um Omar’s school, the pipes were fixed so that sewage didn’t overflow in a corner of the playground, new desks and chairs arrived every year, there were modern exercise books and special dustless chalk. Saddam Hussein seemed as young and vigorous as his upwelling country and he promised a future that was as shining and rich and strong.

  Through the seventies he took control of the mechanisms of state. Party members who crossed him were arrested, demoted, scared off with ringing telephone threats. Much as Stalin took advantage of Lenin’s illness, Saddam overtook the aging Bakr, forcing him into the passive position of figurehead, until he was ready to take over publicly and Bakr “resigned for health reasons” in 1979. Saddam’s first move as president was to invite prominent party members to a meeting. This meeting was videotaped. Saddam sits on a dais, smoking a cigar as his lieutenants announce that a conspiracy has been discovered. Saddam says, with regret and tears in his eyes, that he can remain merciful no longer. Name after name is read out. Those called stand up, shuffling, shocked, and are escorted out of the room by Amn security officers. No one dares to remonstrate, the tension builds electric, the tape goes on and on. Name after name. At the end, with the relief of expiated fear, the remaining assembled burst into applause and laud their new leader with promises of fealty. Some of them are rewarded for this display by being invited to join the execution squads of the purged. Right from the beginning there was never any doubt that the penalty for being on the wrong side of Saddam was death.

  The appointed class monitor dusted the face of Saddam every morning, it was the teacher’s responsibility to make sure that the frame was not broken or damaged. At the beginning of every term the pupils wrote out a selection of the President’s sayings and pasted them on the wall.

  Saddam liked to make surprise visits to schools to see how much progress was being made and spot-quiz the pupils in front of the television cameras. Teachers were always careful to maintain everything very neatly and in order, just in case the President dropped by unexpectedly. When the schools’ inspectors came they made sure that the portraits of the President were displayed well and emphasized that ideals and ideas of wataniya should be integrated into every part of the curriculum. There were rallies and meetings on national holidays but Um Omar never paid attention to the rhetoric.

  “No one cared about the speeches. You just had to be present. I’d rest my head in my hands; if it was a long speech everyone would be asleep. We’d be thinking about what food we had at home, about our kids, what we should cook for dinner.”

  Kamel Sachet left the police in 1975 and joined the army and subsequently the Special Forces as an officer. He strove to improve himself. He volunteered for every possible course of extra training. He spent three weeks in Germany in 1978 doing a course in mountain warfare. He learned Farsi and went on joint exercises with Iranian special forces under the Shah. He rose through the ranks to Major, distinguished by his leadership and ability.

  He was a good husband and father. When he came back from Germany his suitcase was full of presents. For his wife, a coat with a fur collar, two blouses, a hairdryer, perfume, socks and long house dresses. He brought coats of equal value for his own mother and for Shamh’s mother and blouses for her sisters and toys for the kids. On Friday afternoons he would drive Shamh around and take her to see her sisters. They would go on family picnics and the kids would throw up in the car and he would look grim about the smell. He liked to pick a picturesque isolated spot and point out a tree, a stream. Um Omar could never understand why he wanted to stop in the middle of nowhere. She would throw up her hands and say, “What are we doing in a place where there are no other humans?”

  Kamel Sachet expected his family to adhere to his high standards. He did not like his wife, for example, to go out unaccompanied.

  “My husband set the pace for me. He didn’t let me out much. But he never imposed anything big on me. Going out is not a big thing. I could buy furniture, I could change things in the home. I could spend money or not spend money. He gave me his whole salary and he never questioned me. I was his accountant.” She laughed at it, “he had his allowance from me.”

  And he was often away, training, and later, during the war against Iran, at the front. When he was away the house would relax, the children would be noisy, Um Omar would call up her friends and spend hours on the telephone and then, when Kamel called from the trenches and couldn’t get through, she would tell him that the children must have left the phone off the hook. He bought her a car and taught her how to drive and she would go for drives with the children. She would visit her sisters and treat her nieces and her children to the ice cream parlor, admonishing them always that this was a big secret from their father. They never told. All the Sachet children grew up with the authority of their father at home, and the authority of their president outside it. They knew not to tell their father about the ice cream and they knew never to mention things he said about the government at school.

  Um Omar’s discrepancies were not defiance, they were the liveliness of a young woman. She knew very well her place as a wife, and her role of confidante, supporter and homemaker. It was very clear and socially ingrained and she never had a moment’s rebellion. “The man tells you what to do. A woman who knows Islam obeys her husband because obeying her husband and obeying Islam are connected.”

  PHOTOGRAPH: Family snap from the eighties. Shamh has filled out to a motherly bulk. She is sitting on a sofa surrounded by her children. It is a family occasion and everyone is wearing their best. Shamh had her hair dyed blonde and wedge-cut short at the back with quiffed up waves at the front. She’s wearing a colorful dress with wide shoulder pads, dangly earrings and pink frosted lipstick.

  It was only in the mid-eighties that Kamel Sachet insisted on Islamic covering for his wife and daughters. Um Omar resisted and refused for three years. It took her a long time to get used to it, she did not feel comfortable and she would take her headscarf off and then put it back on and complain and submit. Her daughters wriggled and pulled but their father’s will was clear. Um Omar said that children adapt to anything; for her it was more difficult. “I was in my thirties.” Gradually she adjusted, relented, agreed. She began to see the truth of the religious tenet and even came to regret that she had not donned the hijab earlier.

  The war against Iran wore on through the decade, debilitating, grindingly attritive. The longer the war went on the more religious Kamel Sachet became. He was in his thirties when he began to pray at the correct times, five times a day. He read the Koran and thought what he might have achieved if he had memorized it in his youth. His family became a strict reflection of his rectitude, his faith and his control.

  One day, Kamel Sachet
found an old box of family photographs. Many were of Shamh in her younger years, dressed up and made-up in high heels and lipstick. He didn’t want to be reminded. He took each picture out of the box and looked at it and said, “This is not a good picture,” and then cut it into strips with scissors. Shadwan—his eldest and favorite daughter, perhaps the only one who dared, spinster guardian of her family, its secrets and pride—gathered the photos that he had dropped and kept them. Only the few that we held in our hands had survived the massacre.

  Chapter 2

  HIS FIRST VICTORY

  ZAID WAS THE SACHETS’ YOUNGEST SON, THIRTEEN or fourteen when I first met him, a cool kid, played soccer, liked video games, knew all the Manchester United players. His mother wanted him to apply himself to studying English at school, she tried to help him with his homework, but Zaid was not enthusiastic. She complained, “I end up learning more than he does!”

  The family had an archive of videocassettes, forty or more, that covered the years of Kamel Sachet’s career. Zaid, adept at video recorders, resetting, reconfiguring and hooking them up to the TV, kneeled in front of them one afternoon.

  “What do you want to watch, we are not sure what many of these are…”

  He read out the handwritten labels. “1986, 1988; this one is of a shooting competition my father won.” It was a whole life stacked up in stilted video segments, a life that was, from the labels Zaid was reading, mostly battles. “Kurdistan, Mohamara, Fao, Kuwait, when Saddam visited…”

  I said I thought we should begin with Mohamara because that was the first battle.

  THE VIDEO WAS dull and shaky, striated with age. It had been shot, presumably by an Iraqi combat photographer, in September 1980, during the first offensive of the Iran-Iraq war. For months Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the new Islamic Republic of Iran, had taunted Saddam with the rhetoric of religious revolution; Saddam in turn had reinvigorated old border arguments. The two sides traded insults and rocket attacks, incidents blew firestorms, propaganda machines printed lists of enemies and denunciations. Finally, hoping to take advantage of the revolutionary chaos inside Iran, Saddam ordered an invasion of Khuzestan, a border province with an ethnically Arab majority. He threw a division at the main provincial city, a city the Iranians called Khorramshahr and the Iraqis Mohamara. The division took half the city but was stopped at the river; the Iranians held the bridges. Then he sent in the Special Forces.

  Their assault on Mohamara came from the desert. For much of the footage there was no commentary and the sound was muted. The dark green of the Iraqi army uniforms moved against scenery which was the same dust olive dun, as if war rendered everything khaki in tone. Beige sand, gray desert, yellow shadows of ruts and scars stamped by tank tracks and infantry boots. The sky was filled with black plumes rising from the red volcano fires of punctured oil pipelines. In the first scene a tank crew poked their heads out of the hatches as their tank rolled along a stretch of fresh poured black tarmac road. The camera panned and clunkily refocused on an Iranian tank on fire and beyond it, the flat desert bisected with the verticals of skeletal metal pylons.

  The bombardment of the city began. It seemed heavy: the only sounds on the tape were the boom thuds of the artillery. An Iranian fighter jet flew across the sky, banked and fired three pairs of rockets that flashed with white flame and blew into explosions. The plane tried to climb to safety after its run but was hit by an Iraqi missile and burned in a screaming fireball, in split seconds, to nothing.

  The outskirts of the city came into view. Dry concrete block houses stood isolated from each other. The tanks moved slowly, dead tread infantry spread out between them. The tape recorded the heavy gravel throb of the engines, like a mechanized heartbeat. There was also the blurred sound of distant machine gun bursts. White smoke from farther inside the city indicated Iraqi shelling.

  “That’s him!” Zaid pointed excitedly. His father, Major Kamel Sachet of the Special Forces was marching into Mohamara, striding forth across the battlefield, his unit following him. He wore a clean uniform and he was holding a pistol in his right hand. He wore no helmet and had a heavy black beard that obscured his face.

  Zaid sat up from lolling in front of the fast-forward button, pulled his T-shirt straight respectfully, and watched his father be a hero.

  The battle moved into the city. Almost the entire civilian population had left; only a few families in the ethnic Arab quarter remained. Houses, streets, angles, lines of fire, fields of fire, range and cornered obstructions; walls were parapets. The cameraman stood behind an Iraqi soldier with a long elegant Soviet Dragonov sniper rifle, propped in the empty window casement, scoping the street. Cut to a platoon of Iraqi soldiers strung out under a colonnade of dark dusty trees, advancing amid the random ping ping of rifle bullets. There was an explosion, they fell back a few meters and then ran forward, running across the road, with hip-laden weight, rifles shuggling at their side, heads down, in a running crouch. One stopped, kneeled, and fired a bazooka from his shoulder.

  Um Omar shuffled into the room in her black velvet robe carrying a plate of jammy biscuits. “They were very brave, these young men,” she commented, settling down in an armchair and making herself comfortable. She had just had the sofas re-covered in a brighter fabric, blue and yellow, and wanted to know if I liked them.

  “Yes, very much,” I told her. Zaid rolled his eyes and his mother, catching this, gave him a stern indulgent look as if to say, as I had heard her remind him teasingly on several occasions, “Go and do your English homework again!”

  We heard gunfire outside, loud, but not close by. It was the middle of the afternoon, spring of 2004, and gunfire was common enough not to comment on but, as the gunfire intensified on the video, a re-echo, bursts, volleys, and single shots, it felt like watching a war in stereo.

  For several minutes the action on the tape stopped around the approach to a bridge. The Iraqi soldiers at the bridge fired across the river. In the foreground, next to a splintered tree branch, lay a splayed Iranian corpse, glass-eyed and open-mouthed. The Iraqi soldiers stood a few paces from the body, firing firing, rifles recoiling and juddering with expelled cartridges. One of the soldiers stepped back, flinching, as an Iranian bullet slid past his face. There was the sound of zinging pissing bullets from among a grove of decapitated date palms. Two Iraqi soldiers hauled a martyr from the house opposite. The body was slung in a white sheet and the soldiers carried it one handed, right hands gripping their rifles.

  Edit. End of the battle and silence. Nothing but the streets of Mohamara and on the tape, no noise at all, a silent pan of raw history. The cheering of the Iraqi soldiers had been deleted. The camera showed only a grimy grinning line of soldiers raising their arms in the air with the two fingered victory salute standing underneath an Iraqi flag. Farther along the road, soldiers marched tired and heavy and light shouldering belts of ammunition with victory. One soldier was filmed ripping a poster of Khomeini off the wall with his bayonet. Tanks and jeeps and armored cars drove past Iranian graffiti: “Sons of Sadr.”

  After this footage came a propaganda package overlaid with a hail of bombastic martial music with a strong righteous baritone singing, “I won’t stop. I won’t stop.”

  And a voice of dooming booming wartime patriotic exhortation:

  “This is Mohamara. These are the soldiers of Saddam Hussein. Do we need more evidence? They are so powerful: each Iraqi soldier equals 1,000 of the enemy. We are victorious and now move to new battles for the sake of Iraq and for the sake of all Arabs.”

  The camera chronicled the empty captured streets:

  “Where are the sons of Sadr soldiers? Or the bodyguard of Khomeini?”

  There was a scene of Iranian prisoners. They looked thin and thinly dressed and only half in uniform. Their captured ammunition belts, their rifles and their RPGs, rocket propelled grenades, were laid out on display. They were what they were standing up in, some clothes, a tired body, fear of the unknown and nothing more. They were ma
rched off roughly and told to keep their hands on the back of their necks.

  The brass voice of victory returned to the soundtrack:

  “These are our heroes of the Special Forces. Their father is Iraq, their mother is Iraq, how could these sons fail to be heroes?”

  Major Kamel Sachet appeared again. This time he was shown conducting a brief meeting with his lieutenants in a room with blown out windows. He was pointing at a map and the over-voice informed the viewers:

  “These soldiers are fighting for our honor and our principles.”

  KAMEL SACHET’S SECOND son was born on 10 October 1980, in the middle of the battle for Mohamara. Um Omar got word to his battalion headquarters in Baghdad and they passed him the news on a radio relay that he had a son. Kamel Sachet wanted to call him Nasser, which means victory, but his driver, called Ali, said that Ali would be better. Kamel Sachet agreed.

  Chapter 3

  HIS ELDEST AND FAVORITE DAUGHTER

  SHADWAN REMEMBERED BEING SMALL AND THE Iranian planes screaming in the night. Her father was away at the front. “We all woke up, we were very afraid.”

  At the beginning the war went well for Iraq. Their anti-aircraft crews shot down the Iranian jets and monuments were made from the wreckage. Shadwan watched the news on television. Saddam was everywhere. “I liked his face. He was handsome and young. He wore good clothes. He was the President.” At school the teachers extolled his virtues as a strong dynamic leader.

  After his great victory at Mohamara, her father came home on leave. One morning she took a book down from the shelf and asked him to help her read what was written inside. He rebuffed her. “I don’t want you to love me. You should give all your love to your mother.” Only much later she understood that he had said this to protect her.