Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (23 page)

The public affairs officer at the U.S. embassy begrudgingly agreed to a meeting, but it came studded with conditions. “I don’t know how helpful I can be,” he warned grimly.

I breezed straight over as if he’d sent an embossed invitation. By then, I was in a quiet panic. The days had flown and still I had nothing but bits and scraps.

He was talking about ground rules as soon as I sat down. I will speak to you about culture, he said. No security. No terrorism. No politics. Only culture, and only on
deep background.
A second diplomat joined us for reasons nobody explained. Just sitting, and listening.

“Okay,” I said slowly, running my eyes over the questions I’d jotted, scanning for something that fit his demands. This was unusual. In other Arab capitals, you could have tea with the ambassador, or at least a political counselor. The quasi-interviews were never on the record
and often disingenuous, but a trip to the embassy was helpful. You couldn’t expect any hard information, or let yourself think that they were on your side because you were all American. But if you paid attention to what they didn’t say, to questions that made them testy, the tone they used to talk about the locals, the mistakes they made—all of this gave a glimpse of what the U.S. government wanted, and how it hoped to be perceived.

In Yemen, America had nothing to say.

I sat with the diplomat and chatted about tribes. He told me guardedly, haltingly, about water wells. If a question veered into the perilous territory of the newsworthy, he’d cut me off. “Sorry,” he’d say archly. “I can only talk about culture.” I’d sigh. He’d shrug. The minute hand dragged itself in a ring around the clock.

One of my last nights in Yemen, Mohammed and I drove out of Sanaa to hear a poetry recitation in the countryside. At the edge of the capital, thin mountain air was blown with fine dust and rank with rotten perfumes of garbage and sewage. We passed trucks sagging under the weight of broken basalt; fruit stands heaped with rusty grapes, oranges, pomegranates; mountains of piping and tile to build or adorn a home. The road sank, rose, and rolled behind the rocks, wrapping a black cord up the mountain. “You whose beauty is killing me, you still live in my eyes,” wailed the radio. “I am suffering but I have no other choice.” The mountains were slumped and rounded shoulders, worn by the seasons, skimmed by the shadows of clouds. We were far from the city now. Wild dogs roamed the roads. Mud houses crouched in the scabby clearings of qat orchards.

They don’t grow anything except qat, Mohammed said. Qat is killing our country, deadening our soil, squeezing out other crops. People here, they live only to grow and chew qat. Drums throbbed dryly from the radio. Mohammed’s own plastic sack of qat lay at his side.

We were meeting a poet named Amin Mashrigi, who penned verses scornful of terrorism. The government paid him to roam around the hardscrabble, qat-addled countryside, reciting his poems and encouraging the villagers to come up with their own rhymes.

Outside the capital, the rule of the tribe, the power of Islam, and the communal balm of poetry trumped the authority of the central government. Out here, spoken verse was enough to wed or divorce; protect or condemn. Poetry was practical. When tribesmen headed into negotiations over water or grazing rights, boundaries or vengeance, they came chanting verse to advertise their grievances. Negotiations might stretch for days.

The villagers of Jerif pressed tight against the truck—men staring stolidly, children yanking on my jeans, women hanging shyly back, eyes locked on my face. “They’ve been waiting for us.” Mohammed grinned. “They say you are the first foreigner who’s ever visited their village.”

The town was just a handful of mud huts in the meager shade of spindly qat trees. Only one structure qualified vaguely as a municipal building, and that was the qat-chewing hall where the men passed long afternoon hours. They led us through the slanting sunset, and I entered with the men while the women lingered outside.

Cheap sports coats covered the men’s thobes; pistols bristled from their hips, and curved, carved daggers lay against their guts. They had apparently laid waste to orchards for miles around, and we lolled in a bower of qat. Mashrigi stood before us and his voice rang out, proud and acrobatic, gliding up and falling low to perch on a single, long-stretched syllable.

His audience sat rapt.

Then he called out: “Who is writing poetry?”

“I am!” the voices rose around the room.

“Is anybody writing about terror and security?” he asked. “About carrying a gun?”

A wiry villager stood, an enormous ball of qat jammed into his teeth and a cigarette poised in hand. As he chanted the green showed between his teeth:

The men clapped and hollered.

Another man rose to recite. He stood, long and thin before the crowd, brushing flies from his face. There was no sound but quiet chomping. He began:

All the faces turned upward. Mohammed was whispering the translation. The poet was carrying on now, sinking into a groove that was anti-American, anti-Semitic, and antigovernment.

The poetry dried up, and we climbed to our feet. On the way back to town, headlights probed the dark earth like sliding eyes, Yemen and terrorism and the rest of it slipping back into the murk, into the unseen.

“You’re never gonna believe this.”

Here was Faris, with a huge grin.

“I already don’t believe it.”

“Houthi’s dead.”

“What?”

“Houthi’s dead. They killed him in a cave last night.”

“Who did?”

“The Yemeni army. There was a big shootout. He’s dead.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah! I just heard about it from some contacts. Top officials.”

“COME ON!” I shouted at him. “Are you kidding? You expect me to believe that?”

Since our afternoon of qat and Snoop, formalities had fallen away.

“It’s true.” He spread his hands. “I swear to God. It’s true.”

“I can’t believe you. Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“I swear.”

“This is insulting, Faris.”

“All right, fine. But it’s true. You’ll find out soon enough on your own. I’m trying to give you a tip.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Well, wait. Can you get somebody else to talk about it with me? Somebody from the military, intelligence …?”

“They’re all in meetings. About Houthi.”

“Later?”

“We’ll see.”

Faris’s story was true. Or at least, it became recorded history. The defense and interior ministries released a joint statement. The wires picked it up. I wrote 612 words that appeared on page A-3 of the
Los Angeles Times
on September 11, 2004. Everybody pretended this was the end of the war we’d never seen. But Houthi had a father who took over for him, and the guerrillas raged on. He had brothers, too. And so it went, and so it goes. The unseen war is pounding along still. Last time I flew out of Sanaa, in 2007, I sat with a friend on the plane back to Cairo. Just before takeoff, we watched fighter jets roar off into the sky, one after the next, loaded up with bombs.

“Jesus,” he said. “They’re pounding the hell out of something.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “it looks that way.”

O
n Valentine’s Day in 2005, hundreds of pounds of explosives roared in the heart of Beirut. Death had been dispatched for Rafik Hariri. The blast was strong enough to tear a hole in the city, and to expose Lebanon as a country divided.

A few words about Hariri: He was a sixty-year-old Sunni Muslim, and he was rich beyond all dreaming. He had grown up poor in the southern city of Sidon. When he came of age he set off for Saudi Arabia, ingratiated himself to the royal family, and earned billions in construction. He waited out Lebanon’s civil war there, rubbing robed elbows with sandalwood-scented Saudi princes and gathering bottomless stores of money. When peace came at last to Lebanon, so did a reinvented Hariri, flesh packed into fancy suits, throwing cash to orphans and scholarships and mosques like a Muslim Rockefeller, to build his mansion and let them whisper about the source of his wealth. He came home fresh and rich to a cowering nation with the audacity to imagine that he could reinvent his country just as he had reinvented himself. He became the prime minister and, stone by stone, he rebuilt downtown. He lured tourists back. He flew Pavarotti on his private 727 to sing at Beirut’s rebuilt sports stadium, the one Israel had bombed at the start of the 1982 invasion.

Hariri was not universally adored. His manic reconstruction had helped saddle the country with $30 billion in debt and, moreover, he colluded with the Syrian government, which had been invited under a
1989 peace deal to linger in Lebanon after the civil war as a de facto occupying power. But then, in those years, no important leader in Beirut spurned the road to Damascus; they all cut deals with Syria’s Assad dynasty. But recently, Hariri’s loyalties had shifted. He was trying to get Syria out of Lebanon; he was conspiring with Washington and Paris for a UN resolution. He told his friends that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad threatened him:
I would rather break the country over your head than lose it.
And then the bomb struck his motorcade. He had left Parliament that morning and finished his coffee at a café on Beirut’s resurrected Place de l’Étoile. The explosion killed his bodyguards and his former economy minister; it killed twenty-one people along with Hariri.

Hariri’s mansion loomed over the apartment blocks and tightly packed shops of a crowded quarter that sprawls uphill from the lip of the Mediterranean. Even on bright days, the urban tangle throws shadow over the streets. Most people would set a house like that on a mountaintop or seaside cliff, but Hariri’s house told of his wealth and of his populist pretenses. I am self-made and I walk among you, the house announced, but please don’t forget that I am royalty.

The day of the funeral, I made my way to that house through the streets of West Beirut. The capital was in shock that day. Overnight, Hariri had become the martyr of a new Lebanese mythology; his image was washed clean and his critics fell silent. Hariri’s death had been the obliteration of an idea, an improbable promise. He had told the Lebanese that it was all right to leave the civil war behind, divorcing them day by day from guilt and blood. Hariri had bestowed sweet forgetfulness on a stripped and silent place, a country withering under the weight of memory. In the end they could overlook the suspicion that he had cheated them—and which Lebanese leader had truly clean hands?—because he had restored a national faith, and Lebanon had discovered that faith was something it needed more than money. These ideas were embedded in the image of Hariri, and that was part of the shock. The assassination told the Lebanese that violence would suck them back down. People believed Hariri had been killed for turning against Syria, and his assassination became a focus for all resentment amassed in the fifteen years since the end
of the war—for the sense that Syria had hijacked the country into a military occupation, thick with corruption and heavy with political repression. Sunnis, Christians, and Druze vowed a revolution, an intifada, to drive Syria out of the country.

Now mourners poured into the Hariri home, jammed the metal detectors and thronged the steel elevators that slid silently between immaculate floors. I was carried along by anxious bodies, through marble hallways and reception rooms as big as bowling alleys, laid with Persian carpets and cornered with Phoenician artifacts. Hariri’s wife, sister, and daughter waited in the women’s sitting room, their red faces and black dresses and blown-out hair draped in scarves. Women filed in to kiss their cheeks and squeeze their hands, then stood whispering through painted lips. Waiters circled with thimbles of bitter yellow coffee and teacups fragile as skin. It was almost time to take the bodies out, to start the slow parade down into the city center and sink Hariri into the dirt. The women were nervous and sick with it; they didn’t want to see the bodies go. His coffin was in the hall, smothered in a Lebanese flag and flanked by the coffins of his dead bodyguards. Everybody drifted and milled, wringing hands, dabbing eyes.