We nosed into Mosul and roared along darkened streets that twisted and sprawled over the banks of the Tigris. Hours had passed since the bomber had targeted the Iraqi police. We would go straight to the hospital and look for survivors.
Picture them: Men standing in line on streets stained by age and blighted by blast barricades. They are working class, their clothes and shoes are scuffed. It is payday, and as they wait for their salaries, they pass cigarettes hand to hand. Nobody would work as a police officer in Iraq if he could help it. They are marked men, working for the occupation. But they have lived through everything so far and they are ready to keep going. Tomorrow is the holiday. They will spend their salary on a sheep or, if they can afford it, a straggly cow. Their families will gather and cheer as the men cut the animals’ throats, offer the blood up to God, and pray for blessings in the months to come. These pleasant prospects hang in the cold, dusty air. And then the bomber’s car barrels down out of the day because that is how death comes in Iraq—doubtless and too fast to duck.
The light in the hospital was frail, glistening on things like margarine. The air smelled sour, like medicine and rotten plums and fresh blood. Somebody screamed, the voice bouncing like a ball through the corridors. The ward was one long room, the cots next to each other. In each cot lay a bloody man, and each bedside was hung with faces. There were women in long black robes, and men with rumpled shirt-tails hanging over work pants. Some families leave the women at home. If the women were there, so were the sacks stuffed with spare clothes, crumbling cookies, hasty plastic things.
The chill of night had been banished by gas heaters. Hot, damp air pressed at the bodies, thinned toward the ceiling, swirled with the perfume of shitty bedsheets and puke-soaked mattresses and antiseptics. Needles jutted incongruously from veins. Men stumbled over IV drips, the old wheels of cots tripped their way over a gritty floor, the ward arranging itself. Sweat pushed through my skin, dampening the wool of my sweater, pooling at the waist of my corduroys.
We stood at a bedside and I forced myself to look at the wounded policeman. His face was cracked, and blood had seeped into the cracks and dried there. It didn’t look like a face anymore; it looked like a broken plate that had been plastered back together with blood for glue. There were only his eyes, glittering with fever.
“They are really cowards,” he was saying. “If they want to face us, let them do it man by man—but they’ll never do that! Let them face me, man by man.”
He was thirty-two years old, a checkpoint policeman. “I’d like to make a living for my family. There are no jobs,” he said. He knew people loathed him as a symbol of the occupation, but he got up every morning and did the best he could. He complained about the terrorists, and the Americans too. They tell us to come pick up our weapons, he said, and then they never show up.
A relative at his bedside interrupted. Leaned over, butted in, eager to give an American a piece of his mind. I pretended he was not there. I looked at the wounded man, into his eyes. It disgusted me to look at his young, broken face, and I felt guilty. I was afraid he would see me shrink, and so I kept my eyes on him. I did not watch my pen loop across the page. He was getting off topic now, telling me about his work at the checkpoint, but I couldn’t find my tongue to stop him. I felt vertigo, as if I were falling headfirst, swan-diving down into bloodshot eyes.
“Sometimes I’m seeing so much that is banned, but I’m forgiving him and letting him go,” he was saying. “I’m treating people well.”
Somebody moaned. The flesh inside my skin was turning to air, like I might float upward, drift and bump against that scarred ceiling, a dizzy balloon. “What do you remember about the attack?” I swallowed against my stomach. “What did you hear? What did you see?”
“I was standing near the barracks as soon as the explosion happened. I flew and fell down,” he said slowly, eyes on the sheet. “I didn’t understand anything. It was very strong …”
I sucked at the air, but it was full of the smell of the man’s fresh wounds, infections fighting for his open flesh, his drying blood. I have a friend who is a doctor. She said to me once, in the singsong of a scientist tough enough to tinker with the truths of the flesh, “If you can smell it, it’s inside of you.” I have wished ever since that she had kept her mouth shut.
“I lost my sense,” the man was saying. “I could only hear the assault rifle firing …”
With the salts of a stranger’s blood in my nose, I squinted into my notebook, clenched the inner skin of my cheek between my teeth, and made myself write his words. The page looked dim and distant. Darkness started in a ring at the edges of vision and spilled inward, swallowing my sight from all sides. The world was an old movie coming to an end. I was going to faint.
“Excuse me.” I staggered through the darkness, bumped into a wall, and slid to a floor littered with crusty bandages. Words punched through the dimness. They were surprised. Raheem stopped translating, embarrassed. The family jabbered, annoyed. The world returned, piece by piece, filling itself in.
“Just a minute,” I muttered, raising my head. “I’m sorry. Just a minute.”
My eyes collided with Raheem’s, puzzled beneath white hair. “You have to be strong. We see this every day.”
“I know,” I said, staring miserably at the floor. “I’ll be fine. I don’t know why this is happening.”
“Leave her alone,” Nabil snapped. “She’s sick.”
But I knew Raheem was right. There was nothing wrong with me except that all the bombings I’d seen were running together, littering up the back of my mind. My body was shutting down in protest at the parade of broken humans. The same thing had happened a few days earlier, at another hospital. It would keep happening for months to come. I sat there on the floor, waiting for my head to clear, feeling small at Raheem’s feet. When I could peel myself off the floor I slunk back to the man’s bedside. The men in his family sneered. I asked a few more questions, feet planted on the linoleum, determined not to embarrass myself again. I wrote down the answers and we broke away. To do my job I needed only quotes and color; pieces of description and character. I had enough.
Outside, the night was cold and bright. I gulped the fresh air, grateful for the purity of open sky, the slap of cold on my face.
We spent the night in a drab hotel in Mosul and when morning came, we were finished with the bombing and nobody talked about it. Iraq was becoming a country that swallowed its violence and pressed forward. We were becoming people who did the same. The world starts moving fast around you and you move fast through it, too. One minute slurs into the next; the room and space renew; faces replace one another. You always think you will never forget this one moment, the one you stand in now, but it’s not true. I’d forget everything by nightfall if I didn’t write the details down. The more chaos, the worse my handwriting, but at least it’s there. You snatch up crumbs as you go—a quote here, a bit of description there, moving through events, snorting the world up and swallowing it. At some point you think you have to stop being human or you can’t do it anymore, but then you realize that your writing is nothing but your cut and impressed places.
Day creaked up slowly over the hills, and the city lay swaddled in the gentle ache of sleeplessness. Eid had come at last and I wanted to write something about violence, about ritual, about blood sacrifice and Iraq.
You probably know the story of the sacrifice, the centerpiece of Eid al-Adha. Christians and Jews have it too, though slightly modified. This is the story of Ibrahim, the Old Testament’s patriarch Abraham. Although he is in his dotage, Ibrahim is finally a father to a beloved son, Ishmael. Just as the child is getting big enough to help with the chores, God puts Ibrahim through a test. He orders the father to slaughter his son, Ishmael. Poor, tortured Ibrahim. What can he do? The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Now the Lord wants the boy back. So Ibrahim informs Ishmael that it’s time to die. Ishmael accepts the news stoically, lies down, and offers his throat. Ibrahim holds the knife
aloft. Just then, God shouts down from the sky. Hey, never mind! It’s okay. I just wanted to see if you’d do it. Look, I’m sending you a ram, kill that instead. The child lives, the ram dies, and Ibrahim is celebrated down the ages as the creator’s faithful servant.
The Old Testament has Isaac, not his brother Ishmael, nearly falling under Abraham’s knife. And unlike the Koranic Ishmael, Isaac does not know he’s about to die. He pipes up and reminds his father that they need an animal to sacrifice. Don’t worry about it, Abraham replies darkly, God will provide us with something.
It’s a hard story to love. Ibrahim, willing to obliterate his son to obey a voice from behind the clouds. A petulant God, subjecting his servants to loyalty tests. I meditated on Ibrahim in the Middle East and the more I thought about it, the less I liked the story and its suggestion that faith is enough to excuse the stain of violence. Ibrahim’s God abruptly demands bloodletting in contravention of his own laws. Maybe it won’t accomplish anything grand. Perhaps God would just like to see how far the faithful will follow. As for Ibrahim, he accepts on blind faith that the voice in the sky is not a dream or a hallucination, but marching orders from God himself. This, in fact, is his great virtue—that he doesn’t question or argue. This is the moral of the story. Let us proclaim the mystery of faith, the Catholics say. The trouble is that, centuries later, the Middle East is still packed with murderers who believe they are doing God’s will, privately attuned to the ring of God’s voice. This is still how Middle Eastern battles are fought, by Arabs, Israelis, and now by Americans, too. Blind faith is the footbridge that takes us from virtuous religion to self-righteous violence. That day was the crystallization, a celebration of capricious mercy and murder in the name of faith.
In modern Iraq, families who lost loved ones in Iraq’s many wars pour into graveyards to grieve at the tombs on Eid. Saddam Hussein would be hanged on Eid al-Adha in 2006, in an American-occupied Iraq, while Shiites taunted him. It just worked out that way, officials said.
The stringer arrived before dawn to take us to the cemetery. She had cotton-white skin and black robes, and when she came into the room they whispered that her father was a martyr. His name was Ahmed Shawkat; he was a journalist and a Shabak Kurd, a member of an ethnic and cultural minority centered around Mosul. He ran a newspaper and had written a book on the controversial topic of Mosul’s founding; his efforts had earned him death threats. One day he climbed onto the roof to use his satellite phone. Somebody stole up behind and shot him at close range. They found Ahmed Shawkat sprawled in blood. There was nothing very unusual in this story, only that he was her father, and now she lived under the martyr’s mantle. She had been awake for hours when she arrived at the hotel in the dark. She had already gone to the graveyard alone, to pay her respects.
Sun cracked the horizon at the cemetery, and the land breathed with tides of mourners who pushed and paused, wandering from one family tombstone to the next. Early spring had breathed on the hills, but the tang of cold bit our faces and numbed our fingers. Beggars came, and children, trailing over grass rich as felt. Graves sprouted Iraqi flags, crossed daggers, pierced hearts. Sticks of incense smoked and trashy sweets glistened from the earth. Women keened over graves, singing songs of doomsday: “The God who created heaven and earth can do the same again. If he wants it to be, he’ll say, ‘be.’”
A twenty-nine-year-old man named Ahmed Younis Muhammed stood over the grave of his oldest brother. Like thousands of his countrymen, the brother had been shot dead in the epic folly of the Iran–Iraq war. Muhammed’s family had been suffering ever since: he couldn’t find a job, and they could hardly make ends meet.
I asked him whether his family would slaughter an animal that day. He winced.
“We don’t have anything to sacrifice,” he said, quietly and deliberately. “We have sacrificed enough. We’ve spent our lives sacrificing. All we do in this country is sacrifice.”
Blackbirds circled overhead. Little girls in brilliant dresses blew along the paths like loose petals and, crying and singing, kissed the dirt. Flapping cloth and robes gave the feel of row after row of clothesline. Our heavy-eyed stringer ghosted along before us. The fresh green smell of earth wouldn’t leave my nose, life exerting itself on a field of death.
Soon we left the graveyard and went looking for an animal sacrifice. When we saw a truck cruising past with a lamb in the bed, we followed. We lost the lamb, but wound up on a side street where we caught sight of a young cow being led through a gate. This was the home of a merchant named Jamal Almola. He was a mountain of a man with a thick mustache; he wore bright white robes and his family huddled around his table, drinking sweet juices in anticipation of their feast. While we all stood around introducing ourselves, the cow hoofed at the driveway nervously, tied near the marigolds.
What does it mean, I asked Jamal Almola, this blood sacrifice?
“This is like a prayer,” he said. “We will give the meat to poor families, to help the poor families.”
The cow snorted in panic.
I tried to get Jamal Almola to speak more expansively about the slaughter, but he was having too good a time. He brushed the questions aside, urging juice upon us and begging us to stay for dinner.
The children watched while the men held the cow down on the threshold of the house. They turned its face toward Mecca, and a relative named Rashid cut its throat. The cow did not die quickly. It shivered and twitched. The blood bubbled and surged, swelling over the pavement. The children giggled and knelt down, poking their palms into the blood, playing with it. The men hacked the warm cow into pieces. We kept stepping back delicately, farther and farther, trying to find a spot of dry ground. But the blood grew; it followed us over the soil. It was swallowing everything. Finally I gave up and knew it would stain me, too.
The sky was still steel overhead, and the city had the drained-away swoon of a holiday in progress. We would eat, we would leave, we would drive back to Baghdad … but the satellite phone rang. It always started like that, breaking through the conversation.
There had been suicide bombings in Kurdistan, at the headquarters of the two main Kurdish parties. There were a lot of people dead. How many? A lot, a lot. Dozens, for sure. Maybe seventy. Maybe a hundred. We were the closest and so we should rush there as fast as we could. In my mind I released the story of sacrifice as I’d released so many other stories when news broke—let go the string and let it rise into the sky until it disappeared.
Driving into the mountains of Kurdistan is like leaving Iraq for another country. The Kurds are not Arabs. They had problems of their own—the civil war fought among Kurdish parties; the armed Muslim fundamentalists the Kurds had allowed to flourish in the hills near the Iranian border. But there were moments when the rest of Iraq came barreling up to Kurdistan, and all their internal rivalries drifted off as light as blown dandelion seeds, forgotten for the night and collected again in the morning. This was one of those times: suicide bombers had blown themselves up at the same minute in the headquarters of the two rival political parties. Because it was a holiday, the party faithful—the men and their children—had called on the headquarters to pay respects. The message was meant for all Kurds, and it was not hard to translate: We hate you, and we will slaughter you.
We found Irbil smothered in thick clouds. A cold nosebleed of rain dripped down over empty streets. By then we knew at least one hundred were dead, maybe more. A middle-aged man limped through the wet dimness, his pants and shirt smeared with blood. He was cut by shrapnel and he was in shock, stumbling homeward.
“We didn’t feel anything,” he told us woodenly. “The place. It was all fire and smoke. Until now, I cannot hear anything.”
He had gone to pay his respects to the Kurdish Democratic Party. He had been caught up in the explosion, and now he wandered the streets.
“Why do you think this is happening?” I asked.
“You understand the matter better than I do,” he said coldly, staring at my American face.
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It was quiet for a minute. I heard Raheem groping for another way to phrase the question. The man snorted.
“This is the freedom of sacrifice,” he said. “It seems we must sacrifice for Iraq’s freedom. First we got rid of a bloody regime, and now we must sacrifice still more blood.”
And then he limped off, into the rainy night, into the great uncertainty of Kurdistan and Iraq beyond.
A long driveway stretched down and then twisted around to the side of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Kurds came from the shadows, gathered around, and bore us inside. They were angry and they wanted to show their wounds to the world. Tattered party streamers still flapped in the naked winter trees. A green banner announced: We welcome our respected guests.
A hurricane had been locked inside the main hall. The couches were blasted open, the tiles peeled down from the ceiling, speakers thrown askew, empty plastic chairs strewn like toys. Plastic flowers oozed on the ground, scorched and gummy. There were tangles of ribbon, hats, and shoes that had been blown off the victims. Children’s shoes, too, and gaudy little hats like Easter bonnets. I looked at all those hats and shoes and knew the people who had put them on this morning were probably dead. We were stepping around in wet puddles, and in the back of my mind I was remembering the cow, and the spreading tide of its blood. It seemed like a long time ago. But this is not blood, I told myself, this will be … water from broken pipes, or gasoline, or just anything else, something ordinary, the fluids of a building. But then I looked down and saw what I’d already known: Blood. Puddles of blood spread over the floor, and pieces of flesh floated in the red slicks. It was on my shoes; I waded in it. Animal blood in the morning and human blood by nightfall. The blood was fresh under my feet.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 12
