Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (30 page)

The truck cut through empty streets, between ragged palm trees. Mourners straggled behind in a rough column. They were headed into the badlands west of Baghdad, to the Sunni cemetery in Abu Ghraib.

The funeral procession was passing through the town of Hassuwa when cracks of gunfire erupted: sniping between followers of one of Iraq’s most important Sunni clerics and the Shiite policemen who were escorting Bahjat’s funeral convoy. Those first bullets drew more bullets, and soon the air was crackling.

The mourners abandoned the coffin on the side of the road to hide behind the walls of an old cement factory, but the cameramen kept on documenting. This account is drawn from their footage; I was working the day Atwar was buried. The photographers crouched like cats, moving silent through the rubble, under sagging telephone wires and
tired trees. Dogs yelped in fear. From the minarets of the mosques, the town muezzins called for jihad. A convoy of U.S. Humvees rolled by and kept going, leaving the Iraqis to fight among themselves.

“Please call the interior minister and tell him that our convoy with Atwar Bahjat has been attacked,” Iraqi journalist Fatah Sheik barked into his cell phone, crouching close to the ground. “Can’t you hear the shooting? Please tell the minister.”

Commandos raced through the courtyard. Somewhere, a rooster crowed.

“Send us Americans and national guard,” Sheik begged. “Among us are correspondents, there are almost fifty of us.”

The gunfight lasted more than two hours, until the police escorts ran out of ammunition and the shooting slowed, then stopped. At least two men had been shot dead. The Sunni cleric who presided over the neighborhood sent along a message of apology. It was a misunderstanding, he said. He invited the mourners to stop by his house for coffee. It was just another working day in Iraq. No hard feelings, just two more souls.

At the graveyard the men hoisted the coffin down. Atwar’s friends had covered it with the Iraqi flag and placed orange flowers on top. Because she died a single woman, her family had draped a bride’s veil over the head of the coffin.

They prayed over her body, repeated that there is no god but God, and hurried her coffin along a dirt path through the cemetery. At the lip of her grave, the men began to argue. Nobody should see her body, they said, not even the gravediggers who lowered it into the earth. They shoved and yelled. At last, somebody produced a bedsheet to stretch over the body, to protect it from view. The cloth was blue and yellow and green, its patchwork pattern childish and light.

Atwar’s mother tossed fistfuls of candy into the grave.

“Atwar, my love!” she cried before the cameras. “Can you hear me?”

But Atwar was gone.

As the cars turned back toward Baghdad, a plume of black smoke arched into the sky. It was a homemade bomb that had been laid along the road, planted to strike the mourners as they left the cemetery.

Sometimes you are lucky, and turn the other way.

A
fter Atwar died, the months spun out fast, hotter and bloodier, until another summer caught Baghdad in its claws. Ariel Sharon fell into a coma and was stripped of his job as Israeli prime minister. Iran announced the successful enrichment of uranium. In Iraq, it was dying and more dying, death getting stuck in the glue of itself. You didn’t know how to tell the story anymore. When I returned to Baghdad in the summer of 2006 I went looking for a young Shiite, somebody whose life and aspirations and circumstances could serve as an emblem for a tortured land.

At Baghdad University heat beat the air stiff as egg whites. Dust flew loose from the dying grasses, shaking like pepper into the lungs, and the trees struggled to hold up their branches. Students trickled down the scorched paths and shaded lanes to the parking lot and the street beyond, eyes low and books clutched over their hearts. They moved away when we tried to talk to them. The university had gone to war with the rest of the country. Professors had been murdered and driven into exile. Militiamen moved among the students. You couldn’t just blurt it out: Are you Shiite? We had to finesse, talk about politics and The Situation, listen for dropped hints. Iraq was fractured enough that people tipped their hand when they talked politics. We stopped a young man, but he was shy and inarticulate. We stopped a girl with a Winnie the Pooh lunchbox, but she turned out to be a Sunni.

Then there was Ahmed, stretching in the shade of a spreading tree, jouncing on worn running shoes. When I approached he stood his
ground and cast judging eyes over my face, my clothes, my notebook. Then, satisfied, he gazed at the horizon and answered the questions in nearly perfect English. Caesar, the translator, faded back and finally sprawled on shaded grass as Ahmed’s flawless sentences rolled out.

Ahmed was twenty-three years old, a Shiite living in the urban killing fields of Baghdad’s Hay al-Amal neighborhood. He had the kind of pinched face you see all over the world, and never on a wealthy man: the kite corner jut of cheekbones over wasted dents; eyes deep and suspicious and darting, too dark to tell the pupil from the iris. It was the hardness of his face that was familiar, the anger that glimmered deep behind his eyes like a piece of light at the bottom of a deep well: the face of a man who is learning, bit by bit, the limitations of empty pockets and lowly family stature.

He ran all the time, ran until the flesh burned off his bones. He was running that day, in a T-shirt and old jeans and sneakers he’d bought secondhand. When Saddam was still around, Ahmed had run the half marathon on Iraq’s national team. Now he came to the university campus every day to train, though he couldn’t afford to attend classes. The college kids bustled past to brighter futures as he worked on his body, the only part of him that had ever proven profitable. He’d picked up his girlfriend on campus; she was a college girl drifting forward while he ran circles around the grounds.

“Why do you run so much?” I asked him.

“To forget,” he blurted, and then he shrugged a little, as if to say, I know this sounds melodramatic but it’s also true. “I do this to forget the problems, the situation outside. I can’t stay in the house all day. My father’s afraid. He says, ‘I’ll give you anything to stay home,’ but I can’t, and that makes a problem between me and my father. Even my girlfriend, we had a fight yesterday. In my neighborhood now we live one afraid from the other, because we don’t know who anybody is. When I drive to my house and come home at night, they think I work with the government or with the terrorists. They don’t know. They’re afraid. Each one is afraid now.”

He was a Shiite, though, so maybe he was pleased with the newfound political power his people had picked up since the war. Maybe he viewed these hard times as transitory. He frowned.

“They took the power place, but it’s too bad,” he said. “The problem
in the past was just Sunni rule. Now it’s just Shia rule. It’s stupid. We have to find a balance between Sunni and Shia. I just follow my mind. I think that’s the right thing. God gave us a brain to think, not to follow. Most Iraqis are ignorant, they don’t understand that. If you say Ali al Sistani is bad, they want to kill you. But if you ask, ‘Why do you follow him?’ they can’t answer.”

He didn’t want to talk anymore. His body was turning away, his face fixed in expectation of good-bye. But he took my notebook and copied down his mobile telephone number before bounding off into the stifling gold of day.

“This Ahmed, he’s—he’s
noble
,” Caesar said as we walked back to the car. “The way he answered the questions. It’s great. You know what I mean?”

I did.

I wanted to go to Ahmed’s house, to see the street and rooms, to meet his family. But I couldn’t go to Hay al-Amal without signing their death warrants. Nor could he visit our place—we couldn’t invite a stranger off the street to see the checkpoints and the layout, to glimpse the faces of the Iraqis who lied to their families and neighbors about working with foreigners. Everybody had too much to lose.

So I called Ahmed and arranged to meet neither here nor there, but in the brick-sheathed purgatory of the Babylon Hotel. I had been encouraged by colleagues to think of the Babylon Hotel as a refreshing liberation from our claustrophobic offices, a small, accessible slice of a deadly country. But like everything else in Iraq, the hotel had turned weird and sad. It had been, before, a popular place for posh weddings, but it had gone derelict and sinister, full of tight, hot air and hard glances. Sitting in the sticky cave of the lobby was like squatting in a dried husk of beehive, all industry and motion and joy drained away, abandoned rooms rising into the sky overhead. Thin natural light filtered through streaked windows; dusty stairways rose to dead ends at locked doors; darkened corridors disappeared into shadows. I passed the security guards at the front doors, tugged open my bag to show the contents and stayed silent, wondering who they were, who their friends were. The footsteps of the armed gunman echoed behind mine
in the great halls. He talked quietly to the guards and they didn’t take his gun away. The bodyguard was skinny and owl-eyed, and every time I looked at him I had a queasy urge to run until I lost him. I hated having him there and so I pretended he had nothing to do with me, this poor man who’d been paid to kill people for my protection. Still the knowing itched at the back of my thoughts.

The Babylon Hotel had a lobby café where nobody ever came to take your order, a men’s barber shop, and a women’s beauty salon. The beauty parlor was a gaudy grotto stuffed with cloth flowers and cans of cheap hairspray the size of rocket launchers. Upstairs there was a grubby, smoky restaurant cut from a 1970s disco hall, with deep round pod seats and low tables. There was also a sad little gift shop where I bought, that summer, a baseball cap embroidered with the Iraqi flag and this promise:
TOMORROW WILL BETTER
.

I didn’t really expect Ahmed to show up. Somebody would talk him out of it. Something would go wrong. The meeting was a risk for both of us, based on ill-advised mutual trust. He could get spotted and tarred a traitor. As for me, I had to trust he hadn’t sold me off to somebody in the neighborhood:
I know where you can find an American. She will be waiting for me at two on Friday
. But there he was, grinning a shy grin and loping my way, the same jeans and T-shirt hanging off his skinny frame. His girlfriend swished behind in skirts, tinkling in costume jewelry and ramped up on high heels, polite smile under her makeup.

“I’m so happy you came,” I cried in relief.

“Me too.”

“Let’s have some tea.”

We climbed up to the disco restaurant, and I began to extract, piece by piece, the story of Ahmed.

What did Ahmed think when he heard the war was coming? He didn’t know what to make of it. A dust storm tinted the air blood red for two days straight. Ahmed’s family thought it was an omen. The neighbors said it was the end of the world. His family had fled Baghdad for Karbala when the invasion began. They got so scared they dug pits in the yard, planning to hide underground if the fighting grew too intense. Ahmed dug for twelve hours without stopping, hollowing out useless
craters, working just to feel his muscles ache, to create the illusion of action and control. “Everyone was afraid. The women, the children. You had to do something to make them less afraid, even if it’s a lie. You have to do something.

“I was entirely sure they’d kick Saddam Hussein out, and I was glad. I was sure it would make a difference in five or ten years. Maybe our kids will face a different life, not like our life.”

Ahmed had sailed through high school on smarts and taught himself perfect English by listening to BBC radio, but there was no money for college. He had to find work and prop up his family. His father, he told me that first afternoon in the Babylon Hotel, had “political problems.” In Iraq, political problems can mean anything. Politics are power, machismo, tribal pull,
wasta
. Even a casual squabble with the wrong person can swell ominously into a political problem. Ahmed’s father had a disagreement in the 1960s with a man Ahmed called, capital letters in his voice, “a Tikrit Guy”—a man from Saddam’s hometown and tribe. Ahmed’s father had shot the Tikrit Guy in the leg, and the grudge had never faded because grudges were a national sport. The Tikrit Guy had hounded Ahmed’s father for years, pulling strings to punish him at every turn. Ahmed’s father was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured three times under the old regime.

The second time, Ahmed’s mother had sold everything they owned to raise $25,000. She’d given the cash to a corrupt official who, in turn, wrote a report claiming Ahmed’s father had been executed in the desert, closed his file, and set him free. That was back in 1981, before Ahmed was born. His father, after stopping home long enough to conceive Ahmed, had escaped to Kuwait and found work with a British oil company. When he finally made it home six years later, he’d stuck around long enough to get his wife pregnant again before vanishing back into the government’s clutches. This time his arrest was secret, and the family couldn’t track him down.

“All those twenty months we were looking for my father,” Ahmed stared down into his teacup, memories dark and jumbled. “My mother was pregnant, her abdomen was getting big. We didn’t have a place to live so we were living in rental houses, we moved seven, eight times. We asked everyone. In the end we found a way to get him out of jail.”

The family fled to Karbala, hoping to get off the Tikrit Guy’s radar.
They stayed there until 1994, then moved to Najaf for a few years before finally, warily, creeping back to Baghdad.

Those were long, grinding sanctions years, when Iraq lay frozen under Saddam and Ahmed plunged blindly into his youth. On languid summer days he’d sleep until afternoon, find his friends, look for pretty girls in the market, and thrust his telephone number into their fingers in a fit of hormones and hope. Buy a sweet, cold ice-cream cone, maybe see a movie. The hours clicked out in pool halls. “I’m a professor of billiards,” he says.