Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (32 page)

I was pushing my luck, asking for too many meetings. I wanted Ahmed’s story to be good. I knew I’d never be able to visit his home, but I sketched diagrams as he described the rooms—the kitchen, the family tree and Koranic verses framed on the wall, the nylon bag where he kept his few pieces of clothing. Then I had a better idea: I’d give him a camera, and he could shoot pictures of his home, his world.

We never got around to it.

One day I met Ahmed, as usual, at the restaurant in the Babylon Hotel. And, as usual, Birak came along. But something was askew. They were quarreling, lapsing into Arabic in front of me. Her features were knit; she held her tongue. She gazed at the table. Ahmed stared her down, defiant.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Yes,” Ahmed snapped.

Then some men moved into the restaurant, and she tugged on his sleeve.

“Well,” Ahmed said, “actually, there is a problem. She has been recognized.”

Recognized. Cold fear shot through my veins, pushing from my heart all the way down to my toes.

“What happened?” My pulse bulged in my throat.

“As we were coming in downstairs, at the door, she saw somebody she knows from university. This guy. He’s strong, he’s somebody … you know what I mean?”

“Yes.” He was involved with one of the armed groups.

“So this guy, he says to her, what are you doing here? And she says, nothing, just coming to spend a little time. And he says, you’re not going to meet with that American upstairs, are you? She said, no, of course not, what do I want with an American? And he says, good. Because you know, if you were meeting with an American, there would be consequences.”

Consequences. That American upstairs.

But Ahmed is still talking.

“Well,” he says, “we thought he was leaving. But now he has just come into the restaurant. He has seen us, and he has seen you, and he knows we are together.”

I sit perfectly still, frozen, understanding what it means. I know, we all know, that this could be as good as a death sentence for Ahmed and Birak. And there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.
There would be consequences
. Nobody will touch them here. It wouldn’t happen like that. If it comes, it will come to them later. Nobody will believe I am a journalist. They will think these two are collaborators. The best they can hope for is an empty threat. But people will remember. This label will stay on their heads for years. Secret meetings with an American.

“What do you want to do?” I ask Ahmed. “Do you want to leave?”

“No,” he says.

Suddenly I can’t think of a single question to ask. The blood won’t get out of my face. Birak fusses. She’s barely touching her tea. She whispers to Ahmed.

“Are you sure you don’t want to leave?”

“She wants.”

“Maybe it’s a good idea. Why don’t you two go first?” We never walk out to the parking lot together.

“Okay,” he says.

“I’ll call you.”

They are gone. I pay the bill and walk out into Baghdad’s sordid steam.

Back at the bureau, my Iraqi colleagues tried to make me feel better. “You know, maybe it was a joke,” they said. “Iraqis say anything and you can’t tell if it means something.” There was worry in their eyes.

It’s true—the problem with Iraq is that you just can’t tell. What begins as a notion hardens into truth. Threats and jokes turn into suggestions, take on plausibility and then achieve reality. Impossible things happen every day. The blood of the Iraqis has gotten cheap. All of that is the problem with Iraq.

Ahmed’s telephone never rang again; it was permanently switched off. He might have gotten scared and changed it, but I don’t think so. His determination was too fierce to cower; his sense of courtesy too deep-rooted for him to vanish without an explanation. Unless, perhaps, he was embarrassed. Unless Birak threatened to leave him. Unless he got so rattled he told his father the truth, and his father locked him up in the house. I have invented one hundred scenarios to explain his disappearance. They lie like a flimsy mat over a tiger trap of sorrow and guilt.

The truth is, I don’t even know if they made it home from the Babylon Hotel that day. I don’t know if they lived through that summer, or the summer after. Maybe he is alive somewhere. Maybe he made it out to Europe, or to America. I want to believe that he is unscathed, not just breathing in body but whole in spirit too, that the woman he worshipped was not hurt, that his heart was not broken.

Either way, I know that I am guilty. I took a chance with their lives, walked up to the table and gambled. I came to Iraq in a cloud of violence, part of an American plague. I lured him in with the seductive promise that he was interesting to American readers, that his life had meaning beyond his daily world and that his experiences mattered enough to document. For a young man like Ahmed, shunted aside and mocked, it must have been like a drug.

All of that, for a story I never wrote. Newspaper stories ought to have endings, and Ahmed’s tale didn’t—it just stopped.

T
he operation didn’t even take ten minutes. On a fine and cloudless July morning, Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon scrambled south over the Israeli border and attacked a pair of Israeli Humvees. Three Israeli soldiers were killed and two others spirited back into Lebanon. And with that, another war erupted. Most likely, thirty-two-year-old graduate student Ehud Goldwasser and twenty-seven-year-old law student Eldad Regev were already dead when Hezbollah dragged them over the border to use as bargaining chips. More than one thousand dead Lebanese people and billions of dollars of crushed Lebanese infrastructure later, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that if he had anticipated Israel’s wrath, “we would definitely not have done it.” It wasn’t an apology, exactly, but it was as close as the Party of God has come, at least in public.

The two Mediterranean neighbors had been clawing back and forth for decades. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, attacked again in 1993 and 1996, and had occupied southern Lebanon until 2000, when attacks from Hezbollah guerrillas finally drove Israeli soldiers out of all but a small corner of the country. Hezbollah brags that it is the only Arab army that has driven Israel off a piece of land, and in a sense, it’s true. After the withdrawal, Hezbollah continued firing weak rocket salvos into northern Israel. Just enough to say, we are still here. Israel, in turn, barged its jets into Lebanese airspace. Just enough to say, we are still here, too. Escalation was always a possibility, but until the day Hezbollah guerrillas grabbed those two soldiers, it seemed improbable.

The morning after the raid, I watched the first flush of light creep over the desert airfields of Cairo. I was burrowed into a hard chair at the gate, head wrapped in the wool of sleeplessness. The suitcase had been handed over, the boarding pass clutched, the passport stamped. Every limb throbbed for want of sleep. The cell phone rang. It was the desk in Los Angeles.

“Israel just bombed the Beirut airport,” the dry, calm Los Angeles voice said.

“What airport? The civilian airport? In Beirut?”

“That’s what the wires are reporting.”

“No.” I was impervious, half dreaming. “That’s impossible. Because I am sitting here at the gate and they gave me a boarding pass to Beirut and nobody has said a word.”

“It just happened.”

The beacon of Jazeera glowed from a mounted television. A jabber of confused breaking-news voices; scratchy pictures of fire and smoke. No, it couldn’t be—Israel wouldn’t bomb the newly renamed Rafik Hariri International Airport, with its cappuccino bars and sunburned tourists and duty-free Cuban cigars. It was one thing to jab back and forth with acts of war; it was another to actually have a war, to bomb the civilian airport.

“Hello?”

“I’m here.”

Sunrise spilled on the dirt, flecked the wings of planes.

“I have to go figure this out.”

The steady, dry Los Angeles voice was correct: there was no flight to Beirut, and there wouldn’t be another flight for more than a month. That night, a haggard, chain-smoking taxi driver and I stood on the Syrian border, at the lip of Lebanon. Darkness had slammed down. The war had begun.

“They’re bombing the road into Beirut. It’s very dangerous,” the driver said accusatively.

“I have to go, anyway.” Soldiers and workmen clustered stone-faced around the immigration offices. Is there another driver reckless enough to breach the dark mountains with bombs coming down? No, I see no such fool. Desperate, half-ashamed, I pulled the one trump card that is truly fail-safe in the Arab world: I stuck a pin into his masculine pride.
“Are you scared?” I bluffed. “If you’re too scared to go, I’ll look for another driver.”

He looked at me sharply. He sighed. “This is crazy. It’s not worth the money to get killed.”

“I’ll give you another hundred dollars.”

“For a hundred dollars?”

“What do you want? One fifty.”

He sighed again. He shrugged. He nodded toward the car and we trudged over, climbed inside, and shuddered off into war. Bombs and burning spiced the summer darkness. The road twisted and dipped; we wrenched the car through villages to evade bombed-out bridges and fresh, gaping craters. A checkpoint reared from the darkness and a Lebanese soldier filled the windshield, face twisting, screaming at us to get off the road. “There are Israeli jets overhead!” But we kept driving, hearing and smelling the bombs. News flashed on my cell phone:
Heavy bombing cuts road from Beirut to the border
. I turned it over on my thigh. “We’re almost there now, right?” He ignored me. Long, cold minutes passed. They destroyed the road around us as we drove.

At last the car dropped out of the hills, spun down to the rim of the Mediterranean Sea, out of the dark countryside and onto the empty roads of a city hushed. The driver’s body eased; he chattered and joked. At the curb in front of the hotel, I gave him the money and some guilty words of thanks. Of course, he said as he counted the bills, it was no problem.

I am at the desk of the Commodore Hotel and a huge bellow of sound shakes everything. “What was that?” I snap. The clerk is young and thin and serious. He is running my credit card. He freezes and looks at me. I see him cast for something false to say, but then he simply says, “It’s a bomb.”

“Oh.” I laugh. He does, too. It sounds like we are strangling. I had known anyway. I just wanted somebody else to say it.

Most of the bombs in the capital are falling in the Dahiyeh, the district of sprawling, poor Shiite neighborhoods run by Hezbollah in the southern suburbs. I couldn’t get Hezbollah on the phone so I took a taxi to their offices. I expected to find them, like always, in their
shabby rooms, sipping tea under morose portraits of Iranian ayatollahs. Instead I found everything scattered and broken, the Dahiyeh tensed in the unnatural urban silence that means you have come to the wrong place. Israeli planes had started the bombing that would crush the neighborhood to a fairy-tale forest of smashed apartment blocks and yawning craters. Dolls dangled in fallen wires in the shell of a baby clothes shop; cars were twisted to rubble; highway overpasses snapped and collapsed. Hezbollah security recruits buzzed their scooters along cratered streets that reeked of cordite and garbage. They shook their heads:
What are you doing here, you’d better get out of here—look at that.
They pointed at an unexploded missile; it lay in the gutter in front of Hezbollah’s media office.
The Israelis are up there
, they said and pointed to the sky.

“The only thing that will scratch your skin is your own nail.” That was the taxi driver on the way out of the Dahiyeh. He meant that Hezbollah did well to kidnap those soldiers. We have Lebanese detainees over there, he said, and what does our government do to get them back? Nothing. At least now we have something to trade. At least now we can bargain. We know we can always depend on our own leaders, on Sayed Hassan Nasrallah.

Refugees pour into Beirut in ragged caravans, abandoning the Shiite places where the bombing is the worst—the southern suburbs, and the entire southern third of the country. They wash into scabby parks and fading schools and distant relatives’ apartments. They wilt in molten July, hungry and thirsty and dirty. Nearly one million people have been displaced, and many of them are poor. It’s a disaster. The Americans can’t get their citizens out fast enough. There are about twenty-five thousand U.S. citizens in Lebanon when Israel begins to attack the country with American bombs. They are shocked, in that American manner of people who are used to liability insurance and 911 and the Better Business Bureau and all the other safety nets that don’t exist in the rest of the world.

I jog the packed streets of Hamra, around the American University, down to the sea and along the corniche as a dying sun bleeds into the salt waters. The streets are intimate and hushed. Fingers of trees lace
overhead, casting shadows so cool and quiet they remind me of childhood woods, the secrecy of weeping willows, summer dusk, and the pock, pock of a tennis ball. But it is awful. Men and women wander lead-footed with their children. Their bodies and clothes are dirty; their faces hang slack as they drift homeless in their capital. They watch me, listless and resentful, as I jog past.

One night there was a middle-aged man. He looked worried and decent. His hair was thinning and he had the quiet posture of an engineer, or maybe a schoolteacher. His daughter’s frilly dress was streaked and rumpled, and he was walking her down a quiet street, holding her hand, as darkness thickened under the twined fingers of the trees. I saw them coming from a long way off, and knew from their slow, heavy steps that they had nowhere to go. I had been to the shelters, where old men slept on filthy pads on school playgrounds, where the toilets overflowed and babies screamed and the smells of food and sweat and heat could knock you down. Even the worst shelters were full, and refugees slept skin to skin in city parks, under bushes, on sidewalks. I met the father’s eyes as I jogged past and felt sure they had been sleeping in such a place, and that he wanted to distract his little girl, to walk with her in the fresh air and tell stories under the trees. Their feet fell like steel onto the concrete. He looked back at me, wooden and humble, and I saw myself through his eyes, my clean cotton clothes and running shoes springing light off the sidewalk. Saw myself there and not there, slogging untouched through the murk of desperation, moving past, and I had to keep on running because I was drowning in shame.