Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  Hamid introduced me to one of the Behjars in charge of organizing these mock rallies, a nasty little army colonel who was singularly unapologetic about the rent-a-crowd’s patent phoniness. A great admirer of American history, he told me it was not the Arabs who were becoming Westernized, but the West which was becoming more Arabic.

  “Especially you Americans,” he said with a smirk. “You think of all Arabs as deceitful liars and traitors. We can’t help it; that’s the Oriental mind-set, yes?” He spoke English with an unsettling Midwestern twang offsetting his melodic Arab accent. “But Americans, ah, these are the masters of lies! The fabled Gulf of Tonkin attack with six mythical Russian Swatow gunboats launching their invisible torpedoes, that lie gave you how many years of Vietnam, yes? A great lie, ingenious! And your late President Reagan, very clever, such a magnificent liar! He make himself President dealing in hostages just like a Syrian; he lies to Iran and your Contras; he just says no to drugs with his left hand and with his right he buys and sells to Peru and Colombia and Panama.”

  He chuckled, an evil little snicker. “But I like best his little lies, so pleasing, yes? He Filmed Nazi death camps in the Second World War, so he says. Such admirable talent that he could do this thing without even leaving his country. He tells this story to his Israeli friends, who know he is lying. Such a grand comedy!”

  The colonel was laughing, a raging, furious laughter. It was both fascinating and appalling to watch. Hamid sat silently listening, with only the glow of a cigarette butt he sucked to life occasionally showing the glint of narrowed eyes.

  “Then you Americans lied to Saddam Hussein to trick him into a war. And you lied to the Palestinians and the Israelis; you lied to the Soviets when there were Soviets, and the Russians when there weren’t. You lied to the South Americans, to Europe and Japan. You lied to the Mexicans and the Chinese, everybody. Now you lie to the Khuruchabjans, but most of all, you lie to yourselves.

  “We have learned much of your sophistication, yes? But we Arabs pale into insignificance beside your glorious deceptions. And you, you Western journalists, you report these lies, to what difference? Do the great American peoples rise up and cry out, no more lies! No more! No, lies are for children who are afraid of the night. They comfort you, so you cherish them, keep them safe. You journalists, so proud of your truths, do you know what truth is anymore?”

  He hawked and spat, a gummy wad of tobacco-yellowed phlegm missing my foot by inches. Hamid smiled, a humorless crease across his unshaven face.

  “And what is the truth, then?” I shot back, not so much angry as curious. “Tell me, Arabs never lie anymore?”

  “Of course we do. It is an art and our heritage.” The colonel glared at me with pure hatred. “You have become more Arab than we will ever be Western. But listen carefully, for this time I speak the truth: The difference between Arabs and Americans is that we know when we are lying, because we believe our own lies as we tell them. Then we forget them and make new lies. You Americans tell lies without knowing they are lies, because you don’t believe them at all, yes?”

  Yes. It made no sense, and it made all the sense in the world.

  Early one beautiful blue morning, the air still chill, Hamid had driven me and my optics kid out toward a small town along the provincial border rumored to be under siege by cut-and-run enemy forces. We were competing with a wolf-pack of other journalists, ever hungry for copy, the more blood and guts the better. There had been a brief skirmish between two inept factions during the night, a lot of wild gunfire and noise but with little damaging effect. The main casualty seemed to be a goat run over by a heavy-armored gunjeep on its way out of town. We filmed a wizened old woman lamenting the goat’s rather gory death.

  “Bodies!” one of my esteemed colleagues was shouting furiously at no one in particular. We tried to ignore him as he stamped through the dusty village streets, crazed with frustration. “Where are the goddamned bodies? We need bodies!”

  But while we were elbowing each other to interview the excited villagers, Hamid’s army radio had whispered to him of worse horrors. He literally grabbed me and the optics kid, and drove as fast as the army jeep could take us over the pot-holed road back to town.

  Crude gasoline bombs, large barrels mixed with fuel, explosives and scrap metal, had been placed at selected houses in the wee hours of the morning. They’d looked exactly like the harmless propane tanks many of the families in the poor suburbs depended on for heating and cooking, painted with the familiar green and white logo of Nok Kuzlat’s local fuel company. No one had noticed an extra tank here and there against a house. The bombs had gone off as housewives turned on their gas stoves to prepare family meals, blowing everything in a ten-meter radius into a shattered crater.

  The surrounding houses were all badly damaged, the innocent injured standing outside the windowless ruins, pressing cloth against bloody gashes from the scrap-metal shrapnel as they waited for ambulances slowly pushing their way through milling crowds. But the center of the blast left nothing standing, nothing alive, nothing recognizable as once being a place where people had ever lived.

  The Behjars made two mistakes that morning. The first was placing one of their bombs at the wrong house. Their intended target had lived one street over. The other was blowing up Hamid’s family. We drove up to a screaming crowd still teeming around in panic and confused grief, then pressed our way through to the crater. A neighbor woman recognized Hamid, tearing at her clothes as she wept hysterically. She clutched a small boy to her voluminous robes, half suffocating him.

  Hamid took the boy from her, holding him tightly by one hand. Together they looked down into the crater that had once been their cramped little home. His oldest son, seven-year-old Ahmat, had gone early to the school at the mosque where he learned reading and writing from the Holy Qur’an. Hamid’s crippled uncle, his elderly mother-in-law, his wife, their three teenaged daughters and infant son, were all killed in the blast, their charred, dismembered corpses being dug out of the rubble and laid side by side on the cracked pavement. Bits and pieces of Hamid’s house surfaced from under shattered bricks—a corner from a picture frame, a tea glass miraculously intact, the leg off a chair, a cast-iron frying pan with its handle missing, the scorched remains of the meal his wife had been making still sticking to its round bottom. It resembled some bizarre art show carefully laid out by a demented modem artist: I call my latest creation Surreal Horror.

  A soft whir behind me snapped me out of my shock. The optics kid was filming Hamid and his son, standing silently at the edge of the crater while his neighbors jostled behind him, wailing. Hamid looked up slowly at the camera, a glaze of disbelief on his tanned face, too stunned to even weep. He turned to look at me, something deeply ominous behind his eyes. My skin rose in cold goose bumps.

  “Stop,” I said to the kid quietly while I kept staring at Hamid. I didn’t know why. The whir of film continued. I whirled, knocking one of the flyeyes out of kilter with a sudden angry slap. It snapped, hanging from a wire thread. “Stop filming.”

  The kid dropped the holo down onto his chest, startled and indignant. “What are you talking about? We’ve got it, man—it’s exclusive, this is great stuff!”

  I knew it was. “You’re fired. Get the fuck away from me.”

  The kid eyed me with incredulity, then stomped off in a huff, fiddling with his broken flyeye and muttering. Turning to stare down into the crater, I found to my own surprise I was crying. “I’m sorry,” I said to Hamid, a man I barely knew. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Allah ahk’bahr,” he whispered hoarsely. God is great.

  God is great. God is good. Thank You for our daily catastrophe, without which I’d soon be out of a job.

  He took his young son by the hand and walked away. That evening, I hunted down one of the few illicit bars in Nok Kuzlat and drank a couple of Coca-Cola bottles of whiskey before the owner got nervous I’d be seen leaving drunk, and cut me off. That was the day I knew I was starting to lose i
t, knew I’d seen all the dead bodies, all the children’s corpses, all the misery and stupidity I was ever going to be able to stomach in the name of Truth, Justice and the Public’s Right to Know. I was staring down into the dark mud of my third lukewarm coffee when someone sat down across from me.

  It was Hamid.

  “Peace to you,” he said quietly.

  “Insha’allah. If God wills,” I said, unable to wish him the blessings and mercy of Allah, who so obviously had turned His face from Hamid. I hesitated, then said, “Yah hawalla illâahch.” Markundi, like most Arabic tongues, has an abundance of customary formulae for every event in life. It makes so much more sense than the Western philosophy of blindly ignoring anything bad until it’s rubbed in your face, then leaves you waffling around trying to come up with something to say. In English, I’d have been left stupid and inarticulate in the face of Hamid’s calamity; in Markundi, there was ritual comfort for us both.

  He nodded, his eyes dry and bloodshot. “God is merciful,” he said, his voice husky. The sweet smell of hashish clung to his clothes. “He has spared the life of my firstborn son, and I thank Him for His compassion and benevolence.” The words were sincere, but completely devoid of emotion.

  That in itself was unusual. Arabs are among the most intensely emotional people in the world, flying to the extreme reaches of joy and grief, love and hatred, gratitude and treachery. This quiet, composed man should have been tearing his clothes and weeping, firing his rifle into the air, searching out the company of his brother Muslims to help him express his anguish, not sitting here quietly with a Western journalist.

  I watched him carefully. “He has opened my eyes,” Hamid said, watching me with equal wariness, “and filled my heart.” Simple words. Simple emotions. Hamid was not a simple man.

  “You have great courage, my friend,” I said.

  He smiled. “Do dead men have courage?” I had no answer for that. “I have decided,” he said, “that I am tired of this fighting. I am sick of innocent people dying to satisfy the appetites of greedy men who care nothing about those they claim to love, in whose name they kill us. We are only cattle to be used and slaughtered at their whim.”

  So it has been in these lands for thousands of years.

  “Also, I am tired of foreigners who say they know what is best for us. The Damascus Coalition doesn’t care what happens in Khuruchabja, and the West will only fight for money.”

  “What can you do, Hamid?” I asked fatalistically. “You are only one man.”

  “These words these men spout in their high speeches, this call for ‘democratic progress,’ the ‘people’s will,’ ‘freedom of expression,’ ‘constitutional representation,’ what use are these to us? What do we fhalell’hin know of these? Are cattle capable of understanding?” He was not being contemptuous; he was comfortably resigned to his place in this society. But it is a poor farmer who doesn’t take proper care of his cattle.

  “These words aren’t meant for us, they’re for you, you Westerners who prize useless words like these above all others. Our leaders have learned from you how to say those words which can buy them money and influence from the West, but they mean nothing. Your words are poison. You are all fools, you rich people in your rich countries. This is what you should be telling these rich people who see you on the television. You should tell them they are like stupid donkeys to be deceived by men who kill innocents and call this justice and righteousness. You must tell them this.”

  There was no scorn or anger in his voice, and I sat with my eyes dry, my ears burning. “It’s just not that simple, Hamid—”

  “These men must go,” he said, cutting me off. I imagined I saw the pure demented light of an ancient hashshâshin shining in his eyes.

  “Then they will be replaced by men just like them. Nothing will change.”

  He nodded. “Probably. A wound cleaned may fester again. Or it may heal. That is up to Allah. But it must be cleaned, nonetheless.” He laid a man’s ring on the table in front of me, a broad gold band with the insignia of a high-ranking Behjar officer engraved on its face. The man’s finger was still in it.

  “I will avenge the death of my family. The guilty must die.” Hamid looked at me, unblinking. When I nodded, his hand closed around the ringed finger and it vanished. We walked out of the illegal bar together, an unspoken agreement between us.

  He took me into a world of madness then. He built his own private network of resistance rebels. Orphans and outcasts bereft of their traditional interrelated family ties became their own tribe, forged their own loyalties. They were not the loose group of disorderly maniacs the Behjars had mistaken his family for. These were quiet, serious men, some mere boys. They were shadows flitting through doorways, speaking with glances, silent killers.

  Still in the Behjars’ army, Hamid drove me around for another month, taking me deep into war zones with the berserk nonchalance of a man who doesn’t care if he’s killed. An untapped source, it was a journalist’s dream, a living nightmare. I ignored my bureau chief’s dire warnings, going where no sane reporter dared to.

  I smoked Hamid’s hashish with him as we crouched in rain-soaked trenches while bombs rippled through the ground. To keep warm we shared bottles of whiskey I bought from soldiers. My feelings deadened, I covered the bloodshed with unseeing open eyes, telling the West that they were fools and stupid donkeys in a terminology they could understand, with a calm voice and professionalism that sealed my reputation as a Fearless War Correspondent.

  Hamid was able to take me, along with the equally insane optics kid GBN ordered me to hire back, deep into the Behjars’ domain. Doors opened with the right spoken words, and I was so close to the blast that took out one of the last of the Behjars’ military strongholds, my eyebrows and lashes were singed off. I coughed acrid smoke out of my lungs for weeks.

  I was still young and numb enough to believe our Hawaiian shirts were somehow bulletproof. We learned better; I was shot in the foot climbing over a wall, the optics kid was killed by a mine four days later. After that, Hamid insisted on giving me a pistol, a small timeworn heirloom, his eyes almost shy as he affirmed my manhood with that ultimate of Arab confirmations. I shrugged, stuck it in my pocket and learned to limp. I found a decent freelance optics stringer desperate to crack the networks to replace the kid. We became machines, watching death and destruction, dedicated to preserving it for the masses to savor.

  I knew Hamid collaborated with other insurgent factions, then sold them out if he had to, and I didn’t care. He discarded his uniform and slipped through the dark, sowing a careful garden of death and mistrust in his wake. Most of the Behjars’ top leaders were eventually either killed or escaped into exile. Those who remained were frantic to hold on to whatever power they had left. But by the time the Damascus Peacekeeping Coalition finally got around to invading Nok Kuzlat, they were pretty much finished.

  Hamid murdered quietly and efficiently those people he thought responsible for the death of innocents. I knew better. We were all guilty, but it was getting me the best footage of the Behjars’ downfall possible. The conflict was so terrifying, so huge, there was no possible way to understand, to make sense out of the violence and chaos and killing and hatred.

  Then there was the child. In a darkened doorway. The tiny hands around a gun, black cylinder pointed at Hamid’s back. He doesn’t see. I shout, Hamid twists away. The child lifts the gun, turning toward me. The antique pistol is somehow in my hand. His face is as delicate as an angel’s. Sometimes I wake up in the night, seeing the dark eyes staring at me. Just before I kill him.

  I had thought my feelings were already numbed, but I’d been wrong. Something in me died, then, something nameless and vital.

  Hamid later returned the favor, pulled my ass out of the fire a few times, too, and I lost count of what the score was. Whatever it was that bound us, it was not friendship or loyalty, but something more primitive and inexplicable.

  When the Behjars’ fortified headquarters i
n the center of Nok Kuzlat was stormed, we had all the excitement we could film. I had the exclusive, yelling into the camera to be heard over explosions ripping through the background, hoarse shouting that al-Husam had been assassinated, the demoralized Behjars surrendering en masse, the Damascus Coalition peppered with the odd American soldier out of Saudi Arabia capturing the infrafusion bombs intact. Victorious rebels linked arm in arm danced through the ruins with ecstatic bliss, waving rifles and howling. I could almost feel the bubblehead at GBN Center creaming with joy to be the one lucky enough to have the comm when it happened. I felt no joy.

  The troops were mopping up through the rubble when I walked in on Hamid just in time to watch him cut the throat of a Behjar officer with no more emotion than had he been slaughtering a chicken. It was our friend, the colonel who admired American history so much. He’d been on his knees, hands tied behind his back, eyes white with terror as he begged for his life. When Hamid turned, bloody knife in his hand, the optics man had him on the holocamera with his face clear and unmasked. The dying colonel at his feet kicked feebly as his life gurgled out. Reaching over, I punched the slipclip out of the camera.

  “Hey!” the guy protested, then shut up when he saw my face.

  “You know you don’t film him,” I said quietly. “Those are the rules.” Then I dropped the clip to the floor, smashing it under my heel. Hamid smiled grimly, nodded, and that was it. The optics man ranted on that I’d gone stark crackers, but he didn’t quit. We were all more than a little mad by then, including him.

  I knew if the tables had been turned, the colonel would have murdered all of us with no more compassion than Hamid had shown. Or I had. We were not in Kansas; this was no chivalrous battle between knights in shining armor. The line between what the West considered good and evil was lost here, no mercy given because none could be afforded. I think by that time I really was clinically insane. I slept as peacefully as a baby at night, and covered the carnage with the hunger of the starving.