“Is it far to the hospital?” I ran my eyes over the dashboard in search of a clock.
“No, no, no,” he said. “We have plenty of time.”
“That’s good.”
Then, right out in the middle of the reckless veins of Libyan traffic, the car died. Horns and squeals rang in circles around us; my host managed to force the car onto the shoulder. He hopped out and I did too, drowning for a breath of stultifying air. “I don’t understand this. What’s happening?” he said, and disappeared under the hood. I watched the traffic thunder past. There were cabs.
“You know what,” I leaned into the hood with him. “I think I’m just going to grab a taxi to the airport. It’s getting late, and I’m starting to worry about my flight. Will you be all right here?”
“Yes of course,” he said. “But I’ll take you to the airport! Just wait one minute while I see what’s happened.”
But we were out of time. A slick, black sedan with tinted windows shot onto the shoulder, and all of the doors sprang open. Out jumped the lanky man who sat in the hotel lobby, shadowed eyes following my footsteps, and other men in blazers and slacks. They had been trailing us all along, of course. My stomach clenched. The doctor looked stricken.
“What are you doing?” barked the man from the lobby.
“My friend here was just taking me to the airport,” I said.
“Why did you do this? You disappeared from the hotel. We were going to take you to the airport.”
“Oh, well I appreciate that very much! I had no idea.” Big smile.
The doctor, stammering in Arabic, was surrounded by two of the government men. One of the men yanked open the trunk, pulled out my suitcase and, without a word, threw it into the back of the black sedan.
“Get into the car,” the man from the lobby snapped.
“Actually, I need to go to the airport,” I said.
“We will take you there.”
“What about my friend?”
“Don’t worry,” he said coldly.
This sounded ominous. I walked over. Sweat was pouring down his face. “They say they’re taking me to the airport,” I said.
“Yes of course,” he looked at me significantly. “You must go with them.”
“Will you be all right?”
“I’ll be just fine.” He smiled a sickly smile. “It was a great pleasure to meet you.”
“The pleasure was mine,” I said slowly.
I left him there, in the custody of the government. They could do anything they wanted, sooner or later. The more fuss I kicked up, the worse it would be for him in the end. So I left quietly. They packed me into the backseat and slammed the door behind me with a ring. The air-conditioning was cool on my arms; my face began to dry. I settled into the plush seats, and nobody spoke. They drove fast, plunging through the afternoon, swerving around the other cars. We were driving away from the airport.
“Are we going to the airport?” I tried to keep my voice cool. “It’s getting very late.”
“Wait,” the minder snapped.
“Well, I need to go to the airport!”
“Okay, okay!”
“I can just take a taxi,” I offered.
He laughed nastily, and kept driving.
I gave up and stared out the window. Had they concluded I was a spy, or were they just teaching me another lesson? We wound up back at that same government compound, the one that vaguely reminded me of an army base. “Wait here,” the minder told me, and disappeared.
The minutes dragged by. The car was running out of air. I swung the door open and listened to the heat sing under the trees. I knew I couldn’t leave; the gate had clamped shut behind us. I gave up on my flight. It would take off soon, and the airport was far away. I felt desperate to get out of Libya and away from the pressure of being watched, of being suspicious to everybody, of fretting about getting others into trouble. It had been obvious the moment the black government sedan swung out of the traffic, glinting with power and inevitability: You can’t do anything in a dictatorship. You construct little facades of freedom, but that’s just a child’s game of pretend. The eyes are on you, always, watching and judging and remembering. Sometimes the regime will let you think you are moving around freely. Sometimes the regime will remind you that you will never be free. This was the message: Don’t think you are anybody important. Don’t think we can’t squash you, if we feel like it. You are on our turf now. This was not a personalized message; it was just their way of being, and it came naturally to them.
They gave the message plenty of time to sink in. They let me stew in trepidation for twenty minutes.
And then the Libyans surprised me, one last time. They came to fetch me. They walked me inside. There I found my main minder, the woman, along with Dr. Giuma. My minder beamed at me. You gave us quite a scare there. We didn’t know where you had gone. We just didn’t want you to leave without a proper good-bye, they said with eerie smiles. Then the exclamation marks started popping. Thank you for coming to the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahariya! We have enjoyed working with you!
“I’m sorry, I thought …” I trailed off. “You see, I’m very late. I’m worried I’ll miss my flight.”
“Miss your flight! Never!” these unrecognizably jovial figures cried. “We will take you to the airport ourselves, and make sure that you get onto the plane,” Dr. Giuma told me.
They packed me into the car and the driver crushed the pedal to the floor, throwing us all against the back of the seats. My minder was still smiling, thin and stiff. At the airport, she put a hand on my back, flashed some identity cards, and marched me to the front of every line. She walked me all the way to passport control, and then shook my hand in a firm and almost fond good-bye.
I turned around after a few steps. She was still standing there, waiting for me to leave. I waved the doctor’s wilting bouquet in limp farewell.
“Partners, not wage workers!” boasted a sign on the wall.
“Desire it,” proclaimed an advertisement for European chocolates.
And then there was a message from the Leader: “Wine and drugs are total destruction weapons. Hash is like the bacterial and chemical weapons and the atomic bomb.—The Revolution Leader.”
At the gate, I tossed the roses into the garbage. The plane lifted up into the sky, and Libya dropped to a blur of land, spread there beneath the clouds.
Qaddafi kept all his promises. He relinquished his weapons of mass destruction program. Though still grumbling that Libya wasn’t to blame, he agreed to pay billions to compensate the victims of the two airplane bombings. Bush removed Libya from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The United States opened an embassy in Tripoli. Tourists and oil companies poured in. Vacations in Libya are all the rage these days. In the New York Times’s list of fifty-three places to visit in 2008, Libya came in tenth.
This worked out very well for Qaddafi and his son and heir apparent, Seif al Islam. He didn’t have to stop being a dictator. He didn’t have to put up with free speech, a free press, or opposition parties. He got to keep a stranglehold on the country—and he got to make a lot of money, to boot.
I heard about Libya from Arabs around the region for months. “What is this war on terror?” they’d say incredulously. “Now America says Qaddafi is a good example! Qaddafi! And then they want us to believe they have come to bring us democracy.”
“I know,” I’d say, and shrug uneasily.
After a while, people stopped shaking their heads about the newfound Libyan–American friendship. That was even worse: it disappeared into the vague cloud of disillusionment and disgust that had thickened around the idea of America ever since the invasion of Iraq. Soon it barely rated mention.
A few years later, I slipped into a conference room at a Dead Sea resort to hear Qaddafi’s son speak at the World Economic Forum. Saif al Islam was the new, Westernized face of the Libyan dictatorship. He was olive-skinned, athletic, and almost handsome. His rangy body was clo
thed in a well-tailored suit. The first thing I noticed was that he, too, referred to his father as “the Leader.”
He had come to drum up tourism and investment, but the audience kept asking him about politics. “Libya is a very attractive market,” he’d say, or “Foreign banks are applying for licenses.” Come to Libya, he said, and “you will see the difference.” Then he would stretch his lips and show his teeth in a massive, lopsided grin.
But questions about the dictatorship kept coming, and Saif grew snappier. He was losing his cool. His father’s son, after all.
Libya was not a dictatorship, he informed the audience, slipping into incoherency. “We can’t talk about an absolute dictatorship,” he equivocated.
Why aren’t there any opposition parties in Libya?
“Even people who call themselves opposition and whatever and are not in line with the Libyan regime and Moammar Qaddafi,” he said, “I know them personally. They say, ‘Saif al Islam, we don’t want parties in Libya.’”
“All the world is visiting Libya.” Suddenly affable, he slipped back to his talking points. “And Libya, which was a closed box and a representative of terrorism, this box suddenly opened and we’re saying we have desert, we have oil, we have culture, we have many things.”
Listening to this pampered young heir with his tailored suit and air of entitlement, my thoughts drifted back to the night of the party in Tripoli. I looked at Saif al Islam and remembered how the night had ended.
It was one in the morning, and we were driving home. I sat in the passenger seat, and an older party guest sat in the back. He had lingered quiet and staid all night, nodding his graying head as the young cubs bounced and hollered, but now he was buzzed on black-market wine. He spoke in faltering English of political chants and soccer songs. “The soccer stadium is the only place people can speak,” he told me. “So they yell.” Then he unleashed a torrent of incomprehensible Arabic so I’d know what they yell.
“What does that mean?” I asked, but he ignored the question. He broke into a scrap of a soccer song as we rolled through the sepia tint of streetlights. We slipped past the billboards of Qaddafi’s jowly face, eased into the driveway of the man’s villa.
He got out of the car, and lurched into the frame of my open window. His face was panicked.
“I’m sorry to talk so much,” he said miserably. “It’s the wine.”
His fingers wrapped around the window frame as if he wanted to hold us back with his arms, fearful of the control he’d lose when the car backed up and carried us away into the night, taking his words away from him.
“You didn’t talk too much. It was nice to meet you.”
“Please don’t write the things I said,” his voice rose through the thick air. “I know about newspapers. They write everything.”
Of everybody at the party, this man had spoken the least. Except for his funny little tirade about soccer, he’d barely said a word beyond pleasantries.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I won’t write what you said. I don’t even remember your name.”
“You never met me,” he hissed. “We never spoke.” He looked into my eyes. All of his dignity had melted into the salty night. He was pleading.
“I never met you,” I repeated. “We never spoke.”
He stared a minute longer. He sighed. And then he turned his back, shuffled to the gate, and disappeared behind the walls, feet dragging like rocks.
* Name has been changed to protect the family.
EIGHT
SACRIFICE
On the day of our feast, the black hand came to kill people.
—Official statement read on Kurdish television, February 2, 2004
Violence is a reprint of itself, an endless copy. I mean to say that by itself, violence is not the point. A bomb, a battle, a bullet is just a hole torn in the fabric of a day. Violence is all of the smashed things left behind, and then the things that grow anyway, defiant. Girls move silently behind closed curtains, broken-down schools shut their doors to students, lovers marry in secret. Violence is the babies you have, the jokes you tell, the fixing of windows and mopping of blood. Against that brave human circus of mundane high-wire acts, it is not very important after all, the big empty sound of the bomb, the smell of the chemicals, or the hospital cots where people bleed to death, reeking of burned hair. Anybody who gets close to violence gets a little bit stuck, the gum of it clings to their feet and slows their steps. Iraq was always a tangle to me, a place where there was personal death and also collective death—a city, a neighborhood, a society can get maimed or killed just like a man or woman. The only difference is that cities can be reincarnated, collectives are replenished and resurrected. When the people go, they’re gone for good.
As the occupation dragged toward the end of its first year, Saddam Hussein paced in prison and his sons were dead, but the anti-American uprising raged and the first whiff of civil war was rising from the land. Now going into Iraq meant wading into violence. You felt it when they stamped your passport at the border offices, smelled it when you stood at the door of the plane with the hot winds scouring the tarmac. You expected it and it didn’t startle you. It was a part of every day. In the first months after the invasion, there had been other things, too. Date palm orchards in summer, restaurants spiked with voices, long, sultry drives in the country. Then you began to realize that the war was surging up, covering things. You looked up one day and saw the place disappearing. It was like watching an eclipse, standing on a sidewalk bathed in strange light, and then noticing all at once that darkness has taken over.
The first time I looked up and felt that Iraq was disappearing was Eid al-Adha, “the feast of sacrifice,” one of the most important holidays on the Muslim calendar. It was 2004, a time when U.S. diplomats still had the face to accuse reporters of ignoring all the happy stories of Iraq, and we still ran out to report the details of just about every suicide attack as if suicide attacks were a big surprise.
It was the eve of Eid and I was sitting around the bureau in Baghdad when the stringer in Mosul called. At least nine people were dead in a suicide bombing, she said. Nine wasn’t very many dead, not as bombings went, but it was enough. We peeled off into the desert, pushing up the trash-strewn highways that rolled north under a dull metal sky. Raheem was there, and so was Nabil, a lanky photographer who’d drifted to Iraq from Libya. Once we left Baghdad, we were drawn together in a danger we didn’t discuss. Bandits roamed. Cars got shot out. A breakdown on a desert highway could kill you. You wanted to get off the roads before night fell. We drove scuffed-up sedans in neutral colors. I wore an abaya, and draped a scarf over my head. The idea was to cut a bland profile, to look Iraqi at a casual glance from a passing car.
The bureau driver named Ziad was at the wheel, and Raheem sat beside him. They never said it was a bad stretch, but you could feel the air change. Ziad sucked on cigarettes and Raheem wrapped his silvered head in a checked kaffiyeh. Eventually we’d turn into a town, and you could feel a loosening, the stomach unfurling, the lungs expanding. Ziad pushed a worn cassette tape into the dashboard and Mary Chapin Carpenter’s voice spilled from the speakers.
Saturday night and the moon is out
I wanna head on over to the Twist and Shout
There was no sun that day, only a sky sagging under winter’s weight and the stretches of dust fields racing away until they petered into a vague horizon. Sometimes I remembered that we were going to a bombing. Sometimes I stared out at the drab earth and daydreamed. You push it away as much as you can. When the car ride ends, we’ll be at a bombing. “How are your cousins?” I asked Nabil. “They’re good, I’m thinking of going back to Tripoli to visit them.” I never want the car ride to end.
Here is the truth about suicide bombings: They are all the same. At the scene you smell salty blood and burned flesh. You see scorched cars and broken glass and mutilated pieces that you may or may not immediately recognize as human corpses. People there, the bystanders, are hysterica
l; they scream and weep, and sometimes they yell at you. The people in uniform are officious and struggle to cover their rage. Then you go to an emergency room and interview the survivors, all of whom say exactly the same things, the same quotes, in their own tongues. Their minds linger in those bland seconds before the bomb went off. They were sitting in traffic, shifting weight in line, ordering a coffee. They were thinking about science projects, inlaws, what to eat for lunch. Everything was normal, most of them say. Everything was fine. And then violence reared up and smacked their little corner of the universe, and nothing was ever normal again, although that is not said, and must be inferred. Many people believe they saw the bomber seconds before he set off his charge. He looked like a terrorist. The Israelis said that. It meant, He looked like an Arab. Sometimes they describe a man, and the bomber turns out to have been a woman, or vice versa. It happens everywhere: you see somebody you don’t like just before the explosion, and in your mind that person is fixed as the bomber. In Iraq, bystanders would swear they’d seen an American helicopter hovering overhead, firing down on the street. It is easier to blame a nemesis than to accept chaos as an everyday condition. I saw the car coming too fast. The Iraqis always said that. I don’t remember what it sounded like, I didn’t hear anything, some said, and then I knew they were very close, and lucky to be alive. It knocked me off my feet. I went flying through the air. They describe their return to consciousness, limbs and blood and people dying around them. I saw a man, he was dead. I saw a woman, she had no arms. At this point, everywhere in the world, survivors inevitably say:
It was like something on TV.
Or:
It was like a movie.
Fact: The contemporary human imagination cannot confront a suicide bomb without comparing it to pop culture.
There is a collective response to suicide bombings, the way a society toughens itself and rears up like a snake, and that is particular. Israel invades the West Bank or Gaza. Iraqi Shiites, after the walls of Iraq were smeared with their blood for a few years, organized militias and started kidnapping, torturing, and murdering Iraqi Sunnis. But in the moment, the smoky, bloody moment after the bomb has exploded in a fit of shrapnel and fire and force, there are only victims, their lives burned and their bodies broken to make a point. A suicide bomb is a political statement; it is intended that way. But it’s hard to find politics in the particular. The particular is a great, dumb wash of blood. Israelis and Iraqis, two peoples with no common political ground or shared grievance, act the same roles, say the same words, stumble through the same grasping emotions.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 11
