Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (28 page)

The men of the Brotherhood stood straight and said a prayer for the rain. They prayed that the rain would fall all around them but would leave them dry. They prayed that the water would go straight down to the roots of the plants. They prayed as if the rain were a promise from God, and after each line the men said, “
Ya Allah
.” O God.

Their voices rang like metal through the wet streets, carrying to the high walls ringing the school where the ballots were being counted, over the heads of the police generals who cowered beneath the dripping trees with their shoulders full of stars.

The night wore on and on. In the end, we drove back to Cairo. The
men were still locked up in the ballot station. There would be no word until morning.

In the morning, it came. Moustafa Fiqi had won the seat in Damanhour.

Things like this happen, and you wait for the world to explode. You have heard all the words and threats, the vows of vengeance. I woke up the gray morning after the vote with a hangover from tear gas, adrenaline, and other people’s rage. A bruise had come out on my face. Terse and silent, Hossam and I jolted back over those long, rutted roads to Damanhour, expecting to find a riot in the street, the town closed by tanks, fires in the sky.

There was nothing. Violence came to Egypt, raged up from the earth, strong and stripped of warning. It did what it had come to do. And then it vanished as if it had never existed at all, and you couldn’t tell anything had passed.

A bedraggled brown sheep plodded through a winter drizzle in the main square. The shops were closed, the shutters yanked to the ground. The streets were empty, the balconies deserted. We drove to the Brotherhood’s walkup offices, and found a padlock on the door.

A little boy wheeled by on a bicycle. “They arrested two of the big guys,” he said. “That’s all we know.” He pedaled quickly off.

We asked blank-faced men, punched numbers into cell phones, and finally we found a Brotherhood lawyer who took us to Heshmat’s home. He looked frail, folded into a low armchair in his button-down cardigan. Reedy ankles poked from his pants. He told us what had happened the night before.

He had been ahead at 1:30 in the morning. The judges had started to wander over and shake his hand. Then a security director arrived and asked Heshmat to leave. He called some judges he knew in Alexandria. Was the supervising judge trustworthy? Word came back: Yes, he’s clean. Go ahead. Heshmat left the building in high spirits. Only a matter of time, he thought. But dawn broke. Security forces were being trucked in from neighboring provinces. The government, it seemed, was bracing for unrest. At seven, the judge and security
director finally emerged. They didn’t make eye contact with Heshmat. Their announcement was plain: Fiqi by a landslide.

Now Heshmat’s bravado was gone. You could see defeat in every curve of his posture.

“I don’t know how he’ll feel, being Parliament speaker, knowing he won by forgery. As an intellectual, he’s finished,” he half whined. “I’m planning to appeal and planning to go global to expose what’s happened.” But his voice was listless.

He dropped his head.

“This is such a stupid regime. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

A neighbor burst into his apartment. He had come angry; he wanted Heshmat to put the men out to fight in the streets.

“I really disagree with you,” he told Heshmat, white beard dancing jerkily to his words. “The people are ready to die.”

“So many people were arrested …” Heshmat trailed off.

“So what? So what? Even if they arrest a thousand, so what? We were all willing to die for the ballot boxes yesterday. What they did was unbelievable.”

But Heshmat was unmoved. His son, an art student, had been carted off to jail overnight, along with dozens of other young men. He didn’t have any push left.

“I’m concerned about the people’s safety,” he said. “At the end of the day, this is a crazy regime. They walked all over the people’s will. They can do whatever they want.”

This is called compromise in Egypt: giving the regime what it wants, and what it always knew it would get, one way or the other. Egypt is a study in endurance.

Heshmat finally popped up in Cairo, but it was too late. He made some angry speeches. He said he’d been robbed. He wasn’t the only one: other Brotherhood candidates risked arrest to tell the world they’d been cheated in their precincts. Some judges came forward, too, and testified to the vote rigging.

But their moment had already passed. Ancient, implacable Egypt was creaking forward, crushing the things that had to be crushed.

Fiqi became head of the foreign affairs committee, just like everybody had predicted. He never made any excuses for what happened in
Damanhour; he didn’t discuss it at all. He knew, I think, that it didn’t really matter.

Even with all the dirty tricks, the Brotherhood still did better than anybody expected them to do. They wound up with a fifth of the Parliament. It was their strongest showing in history. The Bush administration saw that, too. They saw the Brotherhood, and Hamas, and Hezbollah all cashing in on elections. After that, we stopped hearing so much about democracy for Arabs. As it turned out, it didn’t look the way they had expected.

I was asleep early one morning when I felt an earthquake roll through the house, as if Cairo were a spread of water and my bed a raft; it rippled and rolled beneath my body. I knew, even half asleep, that it could only be an earthquake. But when I asked around, the driver hadn’t noticed, or the supermarket clerk, or even Hossam. You would think an earthquake would be enough to break something, to shred an old idea, that the shifting of tectonic plates couldn’t help but express itself tangibly in our constructed world. You forget that most earthquakes simply aren’t very powerful. Not compared with all the concrete, bricks, pillars, braces, rocks—the architecture of structure, the foundations of inertia. Something has shifted below the earth, and maybe it will keep moving until it means something, but that day may only come when we are no longer here to see. The earthquake came to Egypt, rattled things about, and rolled off again. Nobody noticed. In the end, I found a wire story on the Internet—a marginal clump of paragraphs, flickering through half-life in cyberspace. An earthquake came to Egypt at dawn, the wire story said. No damage was reported.

At least I knew I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing.

I
stared at the name, and from the sterile text of wire reports, the name stared back.
Atwar Bahjat
. I screwed my eyes into a long blink and opened them. The name was still there.
The bodies of Atwar Bahjat and her cameraman and soundman were found early Thursday …

Winter light struggled through the windows. Outside Iraq clenched tight as a muscle, the streets of Baghdad hollow and silent. I had been writing all night, overcooked coffee chewing my stomach. I was alone in a silent room in a drab hotel, staring at a computer.

The day before, an enormous thing had happened. Sunni militants crept through the streets and set off bombs in the gold-domed shrine at Samarra, revered place of pilgrimage and worship devoted to the tenth and eleventh Shiite imams. Sunnis and Shiites had been murdering each other all day and all night, taking their revenge. Civil war had never felt so manifest. The translators and drivers who worked for the various news bureaus in our building had sorted themselves into separate rooms: Sunnis here, Shiites there. Just like that, all at once. Tight-jawed and tense, they clumped around television sets listening to their respective clerics, getting angrier by the hour. Everybody in the building was nervous.

Staring at Atwar’s name, all I could think about was color: green and orange, blue and red. Instead of memory, that’s what came—the idea of bright color. I hadn’t seen Atwar in a long time, and it felt even longer. Time moved slower in Iraq, weighed down by life and death.

When we met in the summer of 2004, the city rotted and sagged
with hues: the wicked sheen of sunlight on new cars; wilting red flowers taped clumsily to car windows in blaring wedding processions; the soft, green haze of date palm groves. In the few seasons since, Iraq had blurred itself into dry-eyed black and white.

Atwar had worked at Al-Jazeera that summer, covering the world’s biggest story for the world’s most controversial news organization, struggling to prove herself in the crucible of Iraq. Those were the days when homemade beheading videos were delivered to Al-Jazeera and broadcast to the world. U.S. officials openly loathed Al-Jazeera, complaining that the cameramen cropped up conveniently whenever a car bomb went off and accusing the reporters of alliances with insurgents. For their part, the journalists had little to model themselves after: the Arab world didn’t offer many examples of responsible journalism. The network made an interesting story. I asked to shadow a Baghdad correspondent, and they sent me to Atwar.

“Atwar Bahjat!” The Iraqi men in my office had admired her full cheeks and carbonated eyes ever since Saddam’s days, when she’d dished up propaganda on Iraqi state television. “She’s a poet, you know,” Salar told me. It was true: she was a poet, a feminist, and a novelist. She was just twenty-eight that summer, and already emerging as one of the Arab world’s most respected war correspondents.

We met in July, when trees sagged with heat and the landscape blurred into a shimmer by noon. The sun had teeth and a hard glare; every blade of grass glowed like a stalk of ice. An Egyptian diplomat had been freed by kidnappers that day, and Atwar would cover the story. By the time I reached the Egyptian embassy in Baghdad, she was inside. Dozens of sweating, jostling, cranky journalists, mostly Arabs looking for a scoop, pressed together in the framed gaze of Hosni Mubarak and the clammy embrace of broken air-conditioning.

Adorned with lipstick, eye shadow, blue head scarf, and huge turquoise ring, Atwar barely grazed a seat before bobbing to her feet again. She laughed from her stomach, looked men in the eye, and dropped whispers in ears.

The diplomat had been freed overnight. He stepped into the room and cameras snapped in a rain of shouted questions.

A smug smile played on Atwar’s plump baby face.

“Don’t you have a producer?” I asked.

“I’m from Iraq,” she said coolly. “I don’t need a producer for this.”

The press conference was over, and Atwar hadn’t asked a single question. I looked at her, wary. She winked and pulled me into a back room. While the other journalists elbowed for camera positions outside, she had arranged a private interview with the ambassador. She sat with him at leisure, and he answered all of her questions.

Later that night, in the swampy darkness of the Al-Jazeera editing room, we talked about the corrosion of war reporting. I liked Atwar, I realized, and it surprised me a little. I had expected a musty, middle-aged man or a sallow-faced, veiled nationalist. But here was a woman my own age, tugged by ambition and emotion, trying to keep intact. Atwar had never taken a break, and the months were piling up on her. Now she had peeled herself out of her reporting persona and sat there pale and contemplative in the half dark.

“There are a lot of complaints about Al-Jazeera’s reporting,” I said. “The Americans criticize you, and so do the Iraqis. How do you respond?”

“I would like to say one thing.” Her voice was soft. “My generation has been in war ever since we were born. Before this war, we always felt left in the dark. The government would say one thing and we’d see something else. During that time, we got used to that kind of pressure. During this war, it is the same. The Iraqis say one thing, the Americans say something else. Since the war there is more freedom. It’s better since the war.”

Atwar’s job hadn’t come easy. Her bosses didn’t want to send a woman into combat, but she pestered and pleaded, took on the political beat and covered it relentlessly to prove herself. In the end, her bosses relented.

“She was very strong. People in Al-Jazeera always told her, ‘If you
ever feel uncomfortable, come back,’” Ali Taleb, Atwar’s cousin and bodyguard, told me after she died. “But she never did.”

Darkness had begun to nudge against her that summer of 2004. She had driven over a roadside bomb on her way to work one day. Her car was ruined, but she stepped out in one piece. She had been arrested and questioned by American soldiers. She had covered combat in the holy city of Najaf, reporting with bullets and mortar rounds flying overhead. A corner of her character had been dipped in blood—its tinge was on her, but she still seemed whole. Glimpses of death had given her a new reverence before God, she said, and had inspired her to adopt the Muslim head scarf.

“When I go to hospitals and see children dying, I fight myself to be objective,” she admitted. “I’ve been affected mentally and psychologically, but if you’re not neutral around here, you can lose your job.”

She couldn’t afford to cry at work, and so she pushed through the hours, drove home, and collapsed in tears.

“I have seen death now.” But she said it lightly, by way of explanation. “I have been touched by it.”

When we said good-bye, she looked at me with her warm eyes and apple-cheeked face and asked me to keep in touch. To call her if I needed anything in Iraq, any contacts, any help. And I said yes, I would call, but I never did. One story melts into another, an assignment becomes a plane ride, a new hotel room, a different country. I kept moving forward, and so did Atwar, and I guess neither of us had the luxury of time or retrospection.

After she died, I sat with her sister, her aunts, her cousin, and her colleagues. They were the ones who told me the rest of her story: That Atwar had been the head of the family since her father died, and had resisted pressure to get married even though at thirty she was an old maid. She was too caught up in history, too busy building her own career, to start cooking dinner for a husband. She published a book tracing her adventures as a war reporter and had begun writing a second, examining the role of women in Iraq.