The thousands of possibilities, coincidences, crossroads, improbabilities that life offers, incessantly. And maybe, in short, that is all life ever is: negotiating a passage through the vagaries. She thinks about the man, Assem Graieb. Their paths crossed one night and they will probably never meet again. They have gone back to their own lives, their own random fates. She has rediscovered who she is: how she spends her time, her office, the trip to Baghdad for the museum opening, her illness as well. She is back in that story, and suddenly it seems heavy, boring, as if what Assem had given her that night, above and beyond the physical pleasure, above and beyond the smiles, the charm, was a kind of self-forgetfulness. For a whole night, she was no one. Just a name, a smile, a body. She had a respite from herself. And now she has to return to that self. She is busy picking up her files but then just as she is about to leave the UNESCO building her colleague Krystin comes into her office, her face white.
“Mariam, have you seen the news?”
She doesn’t answer, presses her lips, can already sense that what Krystin is about to tell her will hurt.
“You have to see this . . . They’ve taken Mosul . . . ”
It is like a slap in the face. At first she cannot believe it. Then her colleague leads her to a television and on the news channel they watch the images, stunned. Columns of pickup trucks moving along the roads of northern Iraq, long black flags fluttering from the rear. Men who have sworn allegiance to death, now hamming it up for the cameras. It is the start of something. It is as if these men are marching on her. They will not leave her unharmed, they have arisen out of the depths of obscurity, their weapons in hand, to destroy what she has been patiently building for years. She senses that everything she believes in is in danger, confronted now with these men. And she thinks at once of the artifacts in the museum, in Mosul.
He takes his seat in the plane. By the window, toward the front. Next to him a Lebanese couple are speaking a mixture of Arabic and English. He looks out the window. All along the runway, wind socks are beginning to dance. The wind is rising, as if it had come out of nowhere. “Are you ready to go?” asks his uncle again in a corner of his mind. He thinks of Mycenae, the town spilling down onto the plain of Argos, all those men who do not understand that they have already lost, that they will never stop bleeding from their war. And Assem, what will he lose in Beirut? What will he forfeit to the wind by accepting this mission? A man is waiting there, whom he may have to kill. This is not what frightens him the most. What he dreads is having to speak to him, listen to him, engage with him in order to assess the situation. Until now, whenever he was assigned a mission he had a target. He had to find the prey, and kill him. But in this case, he will have to decide. What, with this man, will he weigh in the balance to determine whether he should die or not? Is dealing with stolen art reason enough? Assem mulls it all over, and the wind is blowing harder and harder. Clouds are hurrying ever more quickly across the sky. The sound of the wind is audible in the aircraft. The plane is moving, taxiing toward the runway. “Are you ready to go?” He is ready. He gives his consent to be amputated. Every departure is a loss. That is what he wanted to tell his uncle, and perhaps he was right. He thinks again of the meeting in Zurich. Before leaving, Dan Kovac added that Sicoh had surrounded himself with an odd little band, a strange bunch, neither really political nor religious . . . A Cuban, a Syrian, a woman from Colombia, some Palestinians, two Libyans, some Egyptians as well, and Sicoh reigns over them like a warlord. He also told him that the American calls himself Job. What are they so afraid of? This unlikely group? Or something Sullivan Sicoh has seen . . . He was at the prison at Abu Ghraib in 2004. He was part of McRogan’s inner team. Maybe McRogan has political ambition and is worried about what his men might say about him . . . Or maybe Dan Kovac didn’t tell him everything about Sicoh’s friends in Beirut. Maybe some are agents from other countries? It could be any number of things. Sullivan Sicoh. He thinks about the man he is on his way to find, and who doesn’t know him yet. A man with a bushy beard and fine braids in his long hair. Does he know that the United States is worried about him, about what he says, what he sells? Does he know that they’re sending someone to try and suss him out? Yes. He’s bound to know. That is even, surely, why he chose Beirut, to frighten the people he left behind. Sullivan Sicoh. The more he thinks about him, the more he seems to know him. They are two of a kind. They were trained in the same school, in the same battle. They have obeyed the same orders, run the same risks, been frightened by the same ordeals. Both of them have seen what man can do to man: the very worst. Sullivan Sicoh. Yes, he knows him. The wind blows, lifts the plane: it takes off in a growl of engines. In only a few seconds Paris is behind him. He is between earth and sky, his sole companion that man who is still only a name; but he is eager to meet him.
III
ERBIL
She wept when she saw the images of the museum in Mosul, shown over and over on the news channels: a man wearing a dishdasha, an angle grinder in his hand, hard at work on the great winged colossus. Others smashing a statue with a mallet. She put her hand over her mouth, as if she were about to cry out, or throw up. Yet she knows how violent these men are, looting, raping, killing. She knows her country is falling apart while this army advances, their black flag brandishing the name of Allah, and that they are just one more aspect of the obscurantism that has always existed, that likes neither music, nor women, nor knowledge, nor the freedom of peoples. She knows all that. There are reports of huge columns of refugees fleeing the north, trying to reach Iraqi Kurdistan. It is said that the Yazidis are trapped in the Sinjar mountains, starving, and they are shown no mercy—women, children, old people. Is that not worse, their blood, those mothers searching in vain for a refuge, those faces gaunt with fatigue, still fleeing, always fleeing, endlessly? Is that not worse than a few nicks of the angle grinder against stone? When Mosul fell, she followed the news by the hour, saddened and dismayed, but she didn’t cry. Whereas every gash this man makes to the face of the stone giant with the braided beard makes her sick. The images on the news show the chaos in the museum. Objects overturned, display windows smashed. Artifacts are grabbed and stuffed in pockets. Others are thrown to the floor with a cry of “Allahu Akbar”; smashed for eternity, the sadness of the few seconds that suffice to annihilate vases and statues that had survived for centuries. Those men overturning urns and striking statues: they think they are subjugating time itself. Oh, it took so long for those artifacts to reach us. The men and women who devoted their life to the cause: Paul-Émile Botta, the consul of Mosul who discovered Khorsabad and brought back the great bulls that have pride of place in the Mesopotamian rooms at the Louvre. Gertrude Bell, who took part in the creation of Iraq at the summit in Cairo, where she had Churchill’s ear and where Lawrence of Arabia nodded, concurring with her analyses; she also wanted to leave the country she loved with a museum, and founded what would become the Baghdad Antiquities Museum, later the National Museum of Iraq. Hormuzd Rassam, the little boy from Mosul who was sixteen when Botta came to his town, and who ended up in Brighton, but not before discovering the oldest manuscript of Gilgamesh . . . All those men who dug and thought and searched and failed and searched again. All those anonymous hands, helping with a pickaxe, raising dust and sand, caressing a newly-found object before passing it on to the excavation leader. All those artifacts patiently dusted, weighed, examined: the centuries had looked after them and now they have ended up here, hurled against the wall, “Allahu Akbar”: how can they even say those words, when all they express is the ugliness and intoxication of destruction?
The first days after his return from Afghanistan—or the first hours—he is incapable of saying how much time had gone by—the room in the military hospital seemed enormous to Sullivan Sicoh, and he did not even try to encompass it with his gaze. He felt it was beyond his strength. He saw bodies, sensed presences, the medical staff coming and going by his bedside, to change a bandage, a drip, his own silen
t thick drip or that of other patients in beds nearby, who occasionally made a sound—a moan, a call, a murmur to themselves—a sign that there was still life in them, however faint, however much that life moaned, a life thoroughly shattered. And then gradually the spells of consciousness grew longer, and now he can open his eyes more decisively. They sit him up in bed and he can see all of the room, smaller than he’d pictured it. Broken bodies. Emaciated men with pale complexions, restless or drowsy. Here he is, back from Kalafgan and in this strangely calm ward of suffering (you’d think that all these young men in here—all valiant soldiers only a few weeks ago—would be screaming, protesting, demanding that the vigor and wholeness of their bodies be restored to them), the nurses wander around like nuns in a convent, hardly moving the air, just the faint light sound of their steps to signal their presence. He looks around him at the broken bodies, the faces full of pain, and he decides that this ward, these beds are not a place of rest and reconstruction, but a place he must run from as soon as he can, that these patients around him are not brothers, but shadows from whom he must flee.
Hannibal touches his eye with his fingertip. There is no more pus. Has it healed? Has his body triumphed over the gangrene? The wound is no longer oozing. He looks out at the horizon, swaying to the slow pace of his horse. He cannot see anything, never again will he see anything, with that eye. But it doesn’t matter. The swamps of the Arno have taken an eye from him. So be it. This Roman empire, on whose ground he is now walking, this empire he has been fighting since his arrival, has had its opportunity to mark his flesh. It’s only fair. It is total war that lies ahead and perhaps he will lose even more, perhaps one eye is only the beginning. All through the campaigns to come, his body will pay the price. He must accept this possibility. So many of his own people will be wounded. So many will follow him, despite lameness or an atrophied hand. The farther they go, the greater the number of crippled men among them. It is only fair that he should know what it means to be on the same footing as his men. War is raging. He is facing Publius Cornelius Scipio. One of them must give way, and it will be the Roman. He has already begun to falter: during the battle at Ticinus, then at Trebbia. He very nearly died on the battlefield, during their first confrontation. The Romans panicked, were terrified, no longer knew what to do. Custom held that in the art of war a winter truce must be honored, but Hannibal ordered his men to continue advancing, despite the cold. They marched on Rome in November, in December, and sometimes there was snow. The elephants died one after the other but nothing could stop the army’s indomitable advance. During the battle at Trebbia, they covered their bodies in oil to protect against the cold, and it was the Romans who died, numbed, too slow, their teeth chattering when it came time to fight, their bodies shivering when they should have been taking aim. Hannibal would lose an eye, yes, but he was advancing. And the Senate was beginning to quake in its boots. Cornelius Scipio seems not to know how to wage a battle anymore, whereas the arms of the Numidian rebels do not tremble. So, surely Hannibal can sacrifice an eye to the Roman soil. What did they all think? That they could ride to victory and remain immaculate? That from so much fighting they could emerge unharmed, fresh as daisies? Since crossing Gibraltar he has given his life over to war. This means his body, his time, his thoughts. There will be injuries, and cries. There will be scars and terror, and if that is all, then he can consider himself lucky. The Romans have not understood this, and they are slowly realizing that what is about to happen will be neither clean nor respectful. There will be no panache. Everything is dirty and terrifying, just like the corpses of the Romans drowned in the snow-swollen waters of the Trebbia—those men with blue lips, bodies stiff with cold, floating drearily. He has lost an eye, it is true. He will go around half-blind now, but this matters little to him, so long as they keep advancing.
“For the moment, they like me,” he thinks, there in his tent, while an aide-de-camp brings a letter informing him that General Buell is stalled and therefore they will confront Johnston’s army on their own. “They like me because I was victorious at Fort Henry and Fort Donaldson, and I’m one of the only senior officers from the Union to have a few victories to my name . . . ” He thinks of McClellan, who is indecisive, McClellan who always waits for months as if he were afraid to move his pawns across the Geological Survey map. Because the men are pawns. There is no other way to look at it. Or then you shouldn’t be a general. There are no farmers, no kindly fathers, no overgrown schoolboys with jolly faces and wide-spaced teeth, there are no husbands, there are only units. Otherwise, how could you decide to send this battalion to the front and not that one? How could you order a group to go on a diversionary mission when you know there is a good chance they won’t make it back? Only Sherman understands this. Because he’s crazy, and he knows that the men don’t count anymore, that you have to accept this way of thinking and that in so doing you forfeit your right to call yourself human. And because he knows all that, he is crazy. And besides, Sherman is brave. Not brave in the ordinary sense of the word, which is merely a variation on obedience. How many men perform heroic acts simply because they have been ordered to, because they don’t have the strength to say no? With Sherman it is something else. He is courageous because he refuses to accept defeat. It consumes him. Defeat makes him want to bite someone, to spur the sides of his horse and charge all alone into the enemy ranks. He disobeys the normal course of events. And not many men have this gift. That is why he was the only one who fought at Bull Run, the only one who truly refused to be in on the spoils. Yes, Sherman can understand. All the others will turn their backs on him when the men begin to fall. “For the time being, they like me,” he thinks, “but that will change.” He curses. The aide-de-camp thinks it’s because of the news he has just brought, but he is mistaken. It is not the fact Buell is delayed that worries him. He is furious because he fell off his horse yesterday and that means that today he has to use crutches to get up out of his camp bed. He is furious because this injury will prevent him from riding into the thick of the battle, when that is where the course of fate will be determined. He knows that things will get ugly, and in a vague sort of way he can sense it will be soon. The only difference between him and his men and the Confederates, is their cause. It’s not nothing. They have to cling to that. The rest is going to be ugly. The men will start killing each other on a grand scale, and they have to resist. The soldiers, whatever side they are on, will be immersed in the fire and the fray, and it is with astonishment that they will discover the sordid face of murder.
Sullivan Sicoh looks all around at the bodies that have been there with him for months, and what he sees is war and debacle. In the wounds, the disabilities, the stumps, the lowered gazes, the tears of helplessness. Like everyone else, he focuses hard to perform his reeducation exercises. He has to build up his muscles again, his body having melted away from the long days lying in bed, he has to unravel the tension that at times makes him look like an old man. He has to fill out, force his muscles to regain their elasticity. He tries to focus in order to forget all the rest, including the pain. Inch by inch, day by day, he reconquers some territory of his own life. He wants to become who he once was and, slowly, he is getting there. He can tell he is making progress. The physiotherapists have told him so. He is recovering his vitality. And then one morning the doctor comes to see him and he knows from the smile on his face that today they won’t be doing any exercises, that they’ve finished, he has reclaimed the use of his body. So he lets the doctor come up to him and before he has time to say a single word, Sullivan looks at him and says, “Are we done? Am I good to go out and kill again?”
In her office at UNESCO she wept. The images were all the same, and the disgust was always new. Until she remembered how greedy men can be. Islamic State, like others before them, will listen to money. They already know that what they are doing terrifies the world and that it is possible to earn vast sums of money with these artifacts that are lying on the floor. The angle grinder was
merely to raise the stakes. Behind it lies the door to a vast traffic in stolen art. So she knows she must go there. And that is also what the head of cultural heritage tells her when she enters her office, pale, holding a folder in her hand that she hasn’t been able to read because all morning all she could do, dumbfounded, was watch the images playing over and over on the television. “If there is anyone who should be there right now, it’s you. Never mind the inauguration at the Baghdad museum. You’ll be more useful in Mosul. There might be a few items you can still save . . . ” Mariam knows she’s right, and that she has to act quickly. So without hesitating she throws a few belongings in a bag and boards a flight for Erbil.
Hear Our Defeats Page 5