Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (11 page)

A body drifted past, borne on bony shoulders. There was no coffin, only a wooden crate, and the lid bounced as the men marched, wafting the death smell into the afternoon. The massive Shiite cemetery on the outskirts of town had halted burials during the war. Now, I saw, the Shiites were back in business.

When I set off to drive through southern Iraq, I expected to find plain stories of liberation and jubilation, open torture chambers and religious pilgrimages. There was an expectation among U.S. officials that Shiites would emerge as the natural allies of the Americans, who had stormed in and freed them from Saddam. But the days among the Shiites were strange from the start. Families draped black banners over their gates to announce the death of people who’d been gone for years. Men crept to the bombed shells of intelligence offices where they’d been tortured to paw in the dirt for documents, kick the rubble in rage, revisit the site of a torment they’d been forced to keep silent about—and to see that site broken and defunct. Gangs hung handwritten lists
of suspected Baathist collaborators in town squares, vigilante death sentences. The marshes and farms convulsed with catharsis.

Underneath the top layer of joy, there welled a pool of disappointment, abandonment and disillusionment too deep to dry. Something dark, strong, and tortured had been uncorked. As far as the Shiites were concerned, America had shown up a dozen years too late. Nobody had forgotten what had happened in 1991: The first Bush administration urged Iraqis to rise up against their government. The Kurds and the Shiites heeded the call and launched a grassroots insurrection against Saddam, expecting the Americans to back them up militarily.

But nobody came. Saddam’s government slammed down, slaughtering thousands, razing fields, tossing men and women into torture chambers. They filled mass graves, sacked shrines, and drained the storied marshlands. An Iraqi friend who worked for the Baathist regime told me that when Saddam sent the army to slaughter rebels hidden in the shrine at Karbala he told his advisers, “We’re both named Hussein. Let’s see who’s stronger.”

The collective punishment dragged on for years. The graves were secret; some families still held out hope that the disappeared would yet return. “We have been killed not by Saddam,” a Shiite man in Najaf told me, “but by America.” He did not say it with venom. It was, for him, a matter of fact.

I did not come to Iraq expecting to hear about 1991; the stories at first rang strange in my ears. And then stranger still to understand that those days still stirred around us. In my mind, that earlier Iraq war belonged to another time. We are Americans, after all, living on our island, and it has always been easy for us to detach from history, even fast like that, in the same generation. We are struck by the distant echoes of events, and the arrival of refugees who are urged to dream forward, not back. We live isolated not only by stretches of ocean and space, but also by kinks and voids in time. We keep our history in a museum case and consider it; but we don’t have much of it, and we don’t regard it as alive. We are here, we push forward, we manifest destiny. Iraq does not live like that. Nobody in the Middle East lives like that. In Iraq, there is no past or present, there is only everything, and it weaves together, shimmering and seamless. Ghosts move among the crowd, fed on stories, fattened by prayer. Hussein dies, year after year,
on the plains of Karbala. When looters raged in the streets of Baghdad, the Mongols had come pounding back across the sands. Saddam is still with us. And the Americans come, lofty and unscathed, cloaked in the power to spin dreams of freedom and break hearts.

The Shiites would crow, “Thank you, George Bush!” and poke up their thumbs, but if you scratched off just a tiny flake of gilt, if you stopped and asked a simple question—What do you think of U.S. troops occupying Iraq? Who do you want to run the country? Do you want a democracy? What does democracy mean to you?—you gazed into an abyss. It was Iran who’d reached out to help the Shiites through sanctions and collective punishment, given them shelter, medicine, and guns, absorbed the refugees. It was Iranians who were now in a position to influence the Iraqi clerics. And, in turn, the clerics were the only figures trusted by the Shiite masses, many of whom pined for an Iranian-style Islamic republic. Maybe the Shiites would never be America’s friends, and it was hard to blame them. They owed the Americans nothing, as far as they could see, except payback for years of suffering. By toppling Saddam, perhaps the Americans had broken even—or perhaps not.

The hotel in Najaf was a desolate tower on the edge of town. Out back, the poorest merchants pushed flimsy Chinese toys and rotten vegetables from stalls of calcified wood and cardboard. When they closed down the market and faded homeward for the night, garbage blew on desert winds and packs of wild dogs snarled through the maze of locked stalls.

The hotel manager was a small, balding man. He covered the dining-room walls with mirror shards and sat daydreaming in his crazy den of infinite, broken reflections. He drank little cups of what he said was tea, the stink of liquor steaming out with each breath. He called himself Abu Adi; he was fifty-three years old, the father of five children. He was one of those people who populate Iraqi towns, a living library who kept local history stored in his mind. We discussed documents. We had been driving to bombed-out, abandoned intelligence headquarters around the south, picking through the rubble, collecting paper that painted a picture of the old regime. Abu Adi said
that looted documents were now going for a price. People pored over them, discovering their neighbors had been spying on them, learning who had collaborated with the regime.

Then, suddenly: “Could you please write down the following statement: ‘What I have seen in courts and prisons, if you hear, you’ll quit your job. If I told you what happened in prison, you would quit journalism.’”

Like so many other southern Shiites, Abu Adi was a little twisted by torture. He’d been arrested for trying to escape to Syria in the 1980s, and spent three years and four months under torture in prison. Three years and four months, he told us, the number seared into memory, and when it was over they sent him to the killing fields of the Iran–Iraq front.

“As soon as the government is established, I’ll make a court case against the manager of public security,” he said.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“I don’t know his name,” he said too quickly.

It was a lie. I knew it was a lie, Raheem knew it was a lie, and he knew we knew. He was still too afraid to say the name out loud.

“I have to chase him,” he filled an awkward silence. “I’d like to see whether this man is a beast or a human being. It bothers me.”

“And now,” I asked, “do you feel safer?”

“We’re still afraid,” he said. “They are talking about liberty, but Saddam’s followers are still here among us and we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

His nerves seemed to sway back and forth, blaring into bravery, then shrinking back into themselves. He grew bold and cursed the old regime stridently, or gave us a crumb of a story. Then fear would slip over him like a hood, and he’d fold back into himself.

“Saddam’s people are devils and shades of human beings,” he spat out.

But then he leaned forward and said softly, “I’m afraid. Please, if Saddam Hussein comes back, come back here and take me out.”

Then, slurping down one last glass of spiked tea, he told us how we could find a local hero: the man who survived the mass grave.

His name was Hussein Safar, and around Najaf they called him the “living martyr.” We found his cousin selling Islamic cloaks in the market, and he sent little boys scampering to find Hussein. While we waited, the cousin led us under the awning of his shop and served bottles of sticky-sweet juice. He smoked cigarettes from a gold plastic holder, stroked his graying goatee, and then he, too, told us calmly about the day he was arrested, along with his mother and three brothers, on suspicion of conspiring against the regime. They had tortured his mother and made him watch. He begged for a piece of paper to sign, eager to confess to anything. They pulled out his fingernails, hung him from the ceiling, electrified him, and set dogs upon him. He confessed to links to Iranian and Kurdish groups, hoping a false admission would make the torture stop. It didn’t. He didn’t get out until his family gave $5,000 to a well-connected neighbor.

As he spoke, his hands trembled. He grew silent. And then, shyly, he said: “Really, it is a shame upon us that we have such things.”

A shame upon us
. I shivered in the heat. Yes, that was it, somebody had finally said it out loud. These people were embarrassed about what they had endured, about the parts they had been forced to play—victims or tormentors, it was all unendurably shameful. They had been co-opted, tortured, spied upon, and had spied themselves. They had sunk deeper and deeper into collective guilt until the moment of their final humiliation: they had been invaded by the Americans. They felt inferior, as if something must be wrong with themselves, in their culture or their souls. Was it liberating for this small-time merchant, admitting these torments to a young American woman with pity written all over her face? My country had just conquered his country, and he was giving me juice, offering me shade, telling me about things I had no capacity to imagine.

Then Hussein arrived. He stood at the edge of the stall and stared defiantly at us. “
Salaam aleikum
,” I murmured. Raheem spoke softly, rolling out more elaborate blessings, letting the man see that he too was Shiite, that he, too, was from the south. Hussein’s shoulders fell slack.

“Look at this.” He turned his back and yanked up his shirt. The crater of a bullet yawned on his left shoulder, deep pink, the size of a crabapple.

“This,” said his cousin, dragging on his cigarette holder, “is why he thought he was dead.”

“So you want to know about the grave?” Hussein’s eyes sized us up.

Raheem assured him that we did. A pause. And then:

“Do you have a car? I’ll show you.”

We slipped into the desert, wrapped in air-conditioning, blinded by sun. As we drove along, Hussein’s story spilled in broken sentences, fits and starts:

It was 1991, the year of the first American invasion and the failed Shiite uprising. Iraqi troops swarmed Najaf to crush the insurrection. Shiite blood ran in the streets. They stopped Hussein at one of the checkpoints choking the city, heard his name and tribe, and arrested him. He and scores of others were carted to the Salaam Hotel, the Peace Hotel, and herded into the garden, where they stood crammed together so tightly nobody could sit down. Lorries came rumbling to take them away with hearts shaking and hands bound. They drove out into the desert, the same road we bounced over now. Finally, deep in the stretches of dunes, they stopped. The soldiers hadn’t bothered with blindfolds. Hussein saw everything.

He saw trenches. He saw four security officers, each one holding a rifle. He understood that it was a firing squad. He understood that there were bodies in the trenches.

Four by four, the prisoners were forced to stand at the edge of a trench. Four by four, the blasts echoed over the desert, and the bodies dropped down into the graves. Hussein stood and watched while they killed four of his cousins and one of his uncles. The sun was slipping low. Hussein would be among the last killed.

He took his place on the lip of the grave. He looked down and saw men still squirming in the pit. Then the guns crashed. The bullet bore into his shoulder, sliced up through his neck and tore out through his cheek. He toppled down into the pit, cushioned by dying men.

“I lost my sense in the beginning, but then I heard something, I felt something,” he said. “They were checking if anybody was still alive, looking at people, shooting.” He heard voices at the edge of the trench. Somebody said, “Just leave them, we have other things to do.”

Hussein listened to the silence. He wondered whether he was alive or dead. Finally he crawled out and stumbled into the desert darkness.
He stayed with the Bedouins at first. They patched him up, but begged him to move along. He moved from house to house, called on the aid of fellow Shiites. When he was well enough to move, he sneaked over the border into Iran and hid there for months. He finally came back with a counterfeit identity card.

Now Hussein murmured directions into the driver’s ear. We turned up a dirt road, bumped along, and stopped. We would have to walk from here. Our shoes sank in hot sand. The desert was blank as forgetting.

“I never came back to this place,” Hussein said suddenly. “I was afraid.”