Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (15 page)

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.

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 hysterical; 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.

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.