Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (10 page)

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.

In the churn of pilgrims we poured into town, blasting past the warrens of shabby shops and through the maze of the market. The crowd pushed and skipped and tripped, the smack of fists on chests rang like the stomp of soldiers’ boots. Caked with sweat and blood from cutting themselves, the pilgrims pushed forward. One million souls jammed the hot, bright streets and more were coming all the while, as if the river of bodies would never be dammed, as if all of Iraq were suddenly Shiite and taking to the roads.

“Where is the reckless Saddam? The oppressor of the pilgrims to Karbala?” taunted the crowds. “There is only Hussein now.”

In the shadow of the shrine the crowd drew into itself. A moon-faced old woman jabbered angrily and poked at my forehead with a dirty finger—a strand of hair had slipped from my scarf.

Everywhere there was a face, and every face was packed with some enormous emotion: the dumb, slack-jawed visage of sleepwalking worship; the knowledge of bloody secrets; pride tangled with rage.
Men had whipped their own backs with chains and slashed themselves with swords, and blood mixed with their sweat. Wild sunlight painted everything a crazy yellow, and the ghostly eyes of Hussein burned the crowds. His story had been whispered for years, until the secrecy under Saddam became a parable of martyrdom in its own right. Now all those layers of righteousness and death spilled into naked light.

The pilgrims stumbled down the steps to the shrine, weeping and shouting and kissing the tiled walls. The women touched the doors as if they were talismans, and as their fingers found wood, their bodies swooned toward the dirt. A dense sea of worshippers swirled and seethed in a courtyard under an open sky. The walls rang with prayer and with the clapping of hands on hundreds of breasts. One by one, as the pilgrims set foot on the holy ground, they surrendered themselves to worship and disappeared into the crowd.

The shrine’s lush gardens smelled of sweat and rosewater; slumbering pilgrims smothered the grass. Peddlers hawked chunks of dirt because, just maybe, the earth of Karbala might contain a trace of the martyr’s blood. “They are telling the story of Hussein’s death,” Raheem murmured. The women wailed and wept and beat their faces as if the message had just arrived, as if this were news and not history.

A small, older woman squatted on the hot earth, staring wearily up at the pilgrims and clutching a black-and-white photograph in her fingers. The tomb of Hussein hulked to the sky at her back, an exquisite mountain of turquoise tile and yellow brick. The woman in the picture was young, maybe a university student.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“It’s the martyr,” she said, and stared hard into my eyes. It was her daughter.

The woman was only sixty, but her face was withered by tears and sun, scratched by wrinkles. Her daughter, Amina Abbas, had been twenty-two years old when she died.

“She was executed by Saddam’s government officials in 1982.” The woman spoke quietly. “She was visiting me here when they took her away. I never knew the reason.” Finally, the government had ordered her to claim the corpse of her daughter. She picked up the body and buried it herself, in secret. She never told a soul. She had lived through twenty years of silence.

“I am here to prove to people that my daughter has been executed,” she said, and tears cracked down her face. “People are saying she’s in prison. I want to prove she was executed.”

She was talking into a roaring crowd; nobody was listening. There were too many dark stories for hers to catch anybody’s attention. Every family had scars, secret graves, people who got erased from the world. In this communal frenzy, there was only room for the tale of Imam Hussein. Beneath his overarching martyrdom, all the other martyrs took their place. It was a straight line of Shiite souls, stretching from 680 down to this moment.

Other pilgrims hesitated before they answered questions. When I asked their names, they cringed. Agents of the former government lurked in their midst, they whispered, and bore their eyes into mine. When I said “Saddam” to an elderly woman, she shook her head wildly from side to side and clapped a hand over her mouth in elaborate pantomime. They were struggling, still, to shake the shades of the past.

Yesterday I had been in Baghdad; now I had crossed into another plane of reality, but this, too, was Iraq. There was no strongman now to force the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds into their former roles. And in those earliest days, each community was living through its own particular reinvention. The Shiites gloried in newfound power, the Sunnis realized they had lost their grip on government and would languish in regions empty of oil. The Kurds set about rebuilding their private corner of the country. The notion of Iraq was yesterday’s invention, a place carved out by European meddlers in the twentieth century. Now it had been dropped and smashed, and each shard was an island. The tides rose in between and swelled into seas: waters of oblivion and loathing, time and tears.

Raheem and I spent weeks traveling southern Iraq together. He was a short, tidy man nearly old enough to be my father, a moderately religious Shiite from the southern town of Amara. Raheem never looked mussed, tired, or cranky. He tucked his button-down shirts into work slacks, cropped his silver hair so it sprang from his scalp like bristles of a steel brush, and kept his feelings to himself. He was discreet, perceptive, skilled at getting information out of people without letting
them realize they’d given it. They say in dangerous places it’s best to be the “gray man”—the person who does not stand out. Raheem was a gray man.

At the time, I knew only that Raheem was a Shiite teacher who seemed secretly pleased by the U.S. invasion. I didn’t know that he hated Saddam Hussein and his Baathist party or that, in his quiet way, he had resisted them fiercely. When he was a young man, good government jobs went to members of the Baath, but Raheem refused to join. His truculence got him stuck in the army for ten years, eight slogging through the war with Iran. He saw other teachers, Baathists, get rushed through the army in a few months. It was a compromise his conscience would not let him make. He was out of the army and driving a taxi when he heard that Yemen needed teachers. He sent an application and wound up overseas for nine years, languishing in financial exile, teaching first in Yemen and later in Libya. He couldn’t afford to bring his wife and children along. He couldn’t even afford a house in Baghdad at first, so his family slept in a room at his brother-in-law’s place. He could only afford to see them every eleven months or so, but he couldn’t find another way to support them. Like most Iraqis, he did what he had to do.

We traveled those first weeks with an American photographer I’ll call John. If Raheem was the East, John was the West. On long rides between southern towns, Raheem talked about the pilgrimage to Karbala, the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the repressions under Saddam. John squinted at passing Iraqi women, shrouded from head to toe in black
abayas
and
hijab
, and said, “Look at those ninjas! That’s a lot of ninjas.”

John had been embedded with the Marines during the invasion, and he made it known to us, day after day, that life with the soldiers had been infinitely preferable to the privations he was suffering in provincial Iraq. He also intimated that he’d never seen a land so devoid of redeeming value. One day he went on a tear in front of Raheem: “This country is so shitty. Everything is shitty. And everything is broken. And the people are just sitting around, doing nothing. Don’t they want to work? It just seems like they’re lazy. I think in the U.S., if we were in this situation, people would be working, trying to make things better. All they do here is sit around and complain.”
Another time he claimed, also in front of Raheem, that Iraq had not produced a single attractive woman. “Show me one! You point out the next pretty woman you see. They all wear those head scarves. It makes them look like hawks. It looks terrible.”

He griped about the dingy hotels. He complained about the food. He didn’t wander the marketplaces or explore the riverside villages. Unless we needed a photograph, he stayed in his room. He badgered us to find American soldiers to hit up for an MRE or “meal ready to eat,” the processed, dehydrated American food packets he preferred to the fresh-baked bread and spit-roasted chicken from Iraqi cafés. I wondered how Raheem was taking it all. He never said a word when the photographer complained. One day, when John had skulked off to his room, I looked at Raheem.

“Well,” I ventured, “John doesn’t seem very happy.”

“Mmm,” Raheem said in his ponderous way. “I think he is miserable.”

He started to giggle. I did too. Then we both laughed so hard that I leaned against the wall and Raheem took off his glasses and pressed his fingers into his eyelids. After that, it became a joke.

“Where’s John?”

“We-ell,” Raheem drew it out, as if it were a dilemma of the ages, “I think, you know, he is in his room.” Snicker.

In Baghdad I had felt a heaviness hanging on me, seen every scene painted in the obscenity and confusion of a nightmare. It was a bad feeling, deep and dark, the collapse of a capital. But in the south with Raheem, it was almost beautiful, sometimes. Quiet came up from the marshes when the light went down in Nasiriyah, soft ticks and screeches echoed from the swamp, and bats and white owls stirred the thick soup of spring sky. At night the heat let up and little boys crept out like crabs to play soccer in the street, skittering barefoot after the ball, their voices ringing down warm alleys. The ice-cream parlor served soft strawberry and vanilla in stale cones and we stood on the sidewalk, slurping at sweetness and watching the night settle. Raheem smiled quietly, saying nothing. It was in those moments, seeing scraps of Iraq the way Raheem saw them, that I felt the first traces of affection for the place, even that way, even broken.

As we drove deeper into the southern heartland, Raheem began to
walk like the earth was soft beneath his feet. He had an air of quiet buoyancy, as if this war were a brave experiment that might just work. And I understood that he, for one, was willing to take the great mad gamble, because he’d concluded that any risk was better than Saddam Hussein. Why not try, said his posture and his quick, sharp glances. When we met American soldiers he drew back and let me do the talking. But he studied them, stood perfectly still and stared with wide, respectful eyes behind his glasses. And later, when we got back in the car, he’d tell me excitedly about the American soldiers, what they’d said and done, repeating their names as if I had not been there with him, watching too. Raheem never sold the Americans out, not even years later, when the war slithered into his house and broke his heart for good. He felt he had no right to complain about what had come, because he had been in favor of the war from the start.

Raheem woke up before sunrise and spent the early morning hours chatting with the people in the hotel lobby or out in the market. I’d find him when I stumbled down, deep in conversation, twirling prayer beads from his fingers in a stream of morning sunlight. He’d already sauntered down to the souk, bought a sack of fresh-baked bread and processed cheese. “Coffee,” I’d croak to the man behind the desk. “You want some, Raheem?”

“No, thank you,” he would say crisply. “I have had my breakfast.”

As soon as we were alone, he’d tell me the pieces of gossip he’d gathered, the scraps of ideas for stories, the leads we could investigate. He brought them out confidentially, proudly, and spread them out between us like seashells he’d stuffed in his pocket.

One day, during a long, bleak desert drive, we pulled up behind a truck crammed with sheep. “Look at all those sheep!” I said.

Raheem laughed, raised his arm in the air, and wiggled it around, making a scooping motion with a thumb. The skinny shepherd signaled back, scarf flapping wild around his head. “He is going to sell the sheep in Saudi Arabia, because the price is better there,” Raheem announced.

“What? How do you know?”

“He has just told me.”

“But, how?”

“You know, we have these signals …” Raheem seemed muddled
now, as if I’d asked him to explain something as instinctive as breathing. “I said with my hand, ‘Are you going to take them over there?’ And ‘over there’ means Saudi Arabia. He said, ‘Yes, it’s better.’ And he means the price.”

He turned his face back to the desert.

American and British soldiers roamed the roads, but the Iranian-backed Shiite clerics were in charge. They had posted orders on the door of Imam Ali’s shrine in the holy city of Najaf. “A Declaration to Keep Peace,” the announcement said.