The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  Shadwan looked like her father, she had his tall grace, his quietude, his seriousness. She was born nine months after her parents were married. Kamel Sachet named all nine of his children himself, and to his first, he gave the name of an island battle between the Egyptians and the Israelis in the Red Sea. “It is a very unusual name,” Shadwan told me proudly, “it was also the name he gave his Kalashnikov.”

  She had a soft pretty face and her father’s firm jaw gave her countenance a weight, a frame, a shape of determination. Her expression was kept carefully demure. In mixed company she always wore a long housecoat, usually blue or olive green, conservative rather than drab, and a matching headscarf. Without hijab, in female company, her hair was dark and wavy to her shoulders; she seemed to smile a little more and the strain of propriety was dispelled. She said little, but she was not shy to speak; in this she was also like her father. She noticed that she analyzed things in the same way as he did, carefully, judging by value, not appearance. When she was a child she was always well behaved and he would hold her up in front of her siblings as the model exemplar. She remembers him laughing at Omar and Ali’s antics and getting down on the floor and playing with them like a lion with his cubs. Later, as the war went on, he stopped laughing with his children, his manner became grim and stiff, and he never played with the younger ones.

  Shadwan was diligent at school, respectful at home and modest in her demeanor. All the Sachet children agreed she was always her father’s favorite; Shadwan would drop her eyelashes and look down into her lap so as not to appear proud, but she would say, “Yes it’s true, I was his favorite, everyone knew this,” and give a small laugh, it was a point of family amusement.

  All through her childhood Shadwan submitted to her father’s pride with obedience. She studied hard and was at the top of her class. She was sent to an elite girls school—Saddam’s daughters were in the years above and below her—but she did not go on picnics or outings or to the ice cream parlor with school friends. If she needed to go shopping she went with her mother. When she was seventeen she asked her father if she might be allowed to go to a small party her friend Sohor was giving at her home. Her father agreed and drove her to the house and picked her up afterward. When she was eighteen she asked again to be allowed to go to the birthday of her friend Amineh. Again he agreed and drove her there and picked her up afterward. At the end of the school year Amineh had a gathering to celebrate their graduation and Shadwan was also allowed to go to that. Apart from family occasions, she had only been to these three parties in her whole life. She had never felt the excitement or the rebellion of being a teenager.

  Shadwan was not naturally gregarious like her mother, she had inherited a gravity, a certain contained self-solitude, from her father. In contrast to her mother’s chortle, Shadwan had a shy smile that spread slowly and rarely. Generally, she preferred to stay inside at home. She told me that it wasn’t so bad: if she was bored she would go to bed and sleep and in sleep there was the respite of oblivion.

  One day Shadwan showed me her room. It was small and austere and lined in wood; against one wall was a narrow single bed neatly made with a green blanket. There was a wooden bedside table, a small lamp and a few shelves. The books were mostly on her two favorite subjects: religion and psychology. The room was dark and functional, no pretty thing adorned it. Shadwan smiled as I looked it over and tried to think of something to say. I could not tell if her smile was one of pride in the room’s modesty or of a more intimate rue, a look between one single thirty-year-old woman to another: do I not deserve something more?

  Sometimes Shadwan would show me a pair of new shoes or a headscarf or a handbag or I would glimpse a flash of diamanté at her wrist or across her toes. She had her dreams and hopes, but her life, through various circumstances—her father’s position, war, lack of security—had been circumscribed, she managed a kind of diffident righteous acceptance of this, but she lamented her shut-in sufferance: “I never had any good times after secondary school.” She bowed to her religion and her father’s expectations. When she came of age, many suitors came to ask for her hand. Her father refused all of them.

  TWO YEARS AFTER Kamel Sachet and the Special Forces had captured Mohamara, the Iranians counterattacked and retook the city. The Iraqi army was pushed back across the desert, fighting in patches, often overwhelmed and tens of thousands were taken prisoner. Saddam shot the general in charge of the retreat and announced that the army would redeploy along the Iraqi border. There was a sense on the television news and in radio reports that this would mean the end of the war; most people were quietly relieved. Perhaps Saddam hoped Khomeini would be satisfied. Khomeini, maddened and bloodied, was not. The Iraqis dug themselves into the desert and settled for a fractious stalemate. The rest of the war, six more years to come, would be mostly fought on Iraqi soil.

  As the war ground on, Kamel Sachet became tougher, more formal and prone to excoriating, tight-lipped anger. The children came to fear his moods and kept a careful orbit around his preoccupation. When he was home the house was quiet, the plumb-line tension in his frown set the atmosphere. His sons looked up at him from a distance, fretted for his approval and dreaded bringing home a set of bad school marks. Shadwan remained his confidante. Sometimes he would tell her about his experiences. Once a trench wall collapsed on him during shelling and he was buried in the sand. He told her how he had waited listening to the voices of the rescue party coming closer and closer until he could hear them inches away beginning to dig him out. She had teased him, “Yes! And then you had to clean your clothes all over again!” And he had told her, “Yes, I got out of the trench brushing the dust from my tunic!”—he was always fastidious about his uniform being clean and well pressed.

  One afternoon, when Shadwan was eleven, a relative who served under her father’s command came to the house and talked to her mother in low tones. Um Omar was five months pregnant and when she came back into the kitchen, there were tears in her eyes and her face was stern and full of worry. She told the children that their father had been wounded and he was in hospital and that, inshallah, he would recover. Shadwan kept a picture of her father under her pillow, and at night, when she took it out to look at it, she would cry a little through her prayers. She heard her mother crying at night also, when the little ones were asleep.

  Kamel Sachet’s eldest brother, Abdullah, came to the house and brought a portrait of Saddam to hang on the wall. He told Um Omar to get rid of the religious books and to stock her bookcases with Baath Party literature. Um Omar wouldn’t let him put the portrait of Saddam up, but she gave away some of the religious books and put some Baathie pamphlets in the small bookcase in the reception room where guests would see them. Various relatives came with advice. Kamel Sachet’s salary had stopped, Um Omar continued working and refused all offers of money; she dared not become indebted or take charity, she would not make her family beholden. She was trying to find a way—phone calls and blind alleys—but everyone she went to for help was afraid to tell her anything. The director at her school called her to his office and told her that if she did not participate in the Baath Party she would not be able to keep her position. She paid up her membership and attended the weekly meeting as required, but Shadwan could see this was something bitter for her. Shadwan could feel a sense of shame in her mother and a sense too of trying to hold her head up in the midst of it. She did not smile any more and shouted at her children when they were boisterous. As the weeks of uncertainty lengthened, so did the space between the words and their meaning that Shadwan overheard in adult conversation. Shadwan began to understand that her father was not in the hospital after all.

  After three months an official came to the house and presented her mother with written permission to visit Kamel Sachet at al Rashid No. 1 Prison. Shadwan went with her mother and her Uncle Abdullah the following Friday. She remembered that the guards were polite but searched everything, even the plates of food her mother had brought. Um Omar submitted to the insp
ection and said nothing as they stirred a knife through her saffron rice and thumbed through the extra clothes she had brought for him. They were shown into a waiting room with a table and a sofa. It was a military place and somehow cold.

  When her father came in he looked tired and thin and his face was pale and yellow colored. His uniform was clean and pressed although his badge of Major had been removed. He hugged everyone and he pulled Shadwan onto his lap. He laughed and pretended to be at ease. “Your clothes!” he scolded them first, “they are not beautiful enough!” Um Omar looked down at her hands. “No!” he said, “You must buy new clothes and the next time you come I will see them and you are not to cry!”

  He told his brother not to hire a lawyer if the case went to court and not to find a solution by asking for favors.

  “I am here until I am here,” he said. He told his wife to call the baby Ahmed if it was a boy and Esma if it was a girl. He told them everything would be alright.

  Chapter 4

  INSIDE

  WITH HINDSIGHT, IT SEEMED TO DR. HASSAN that the long and miserable national descent began in 1983. Three years into the war, the oil money began to run out, blood into sand. The dinar fell from its stronghold of one to three dollars and would carry on falling for the next twenty years. For the first time Iraqis needed to have official permission to leave the country, and those with strategic skills—army officers, doctors, engineers—often found permission denied. Something changed: a sense of weariness and wariness, of claustrophobia; casualties mounted; war sacrifice ate hope with increasing ravening. Life became separated into before and after; good times and times that had to be endured.

  Long decades later, in the spring of 2006, Dr. Hassan and I sat in his office in safe exile in Abu Dhabi, reflecting. Dr. Hassan had been watching the coverage of Saddam’s trial. In court Saddam had jabbed and lectured, cogent and defiant. In Dr. Hassan’s professional opinion, Saddam was “paranoiac aggressive”; in his own world he was still President. He threw his prosecution back in the face of those kangaroos who dared to make up their own justice and declared, “I am responsible for everything!”

  The formal charge against Saddam was the killing of over a hundred male inhabitants of the town of Dujeil, reprisal for an assassination attempt in 1982.

  “Did you see they read the name of the doctor who was attending the execution in Dujeil?” Dr. Hassan leaned back in his chair and rubbed one side of his face with his palm, a gesture of strain, an effort of self-reassurance. “The doctor’s signature was on the death certificates.” Dr. Hassan was caught by the idea that the signature could have been his own. “Dr. Huda,” he recalled, distractedly, to himself, “yes something like this, it was a Christian name…one day if my name…and at the trial of Saddam Hussein, was read out…”

  “When did you realize it was bad? 1983? Or earlier?”

  We went back to the very beginning.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1968 Hassan graduated from high school with the highest mark in all of Kerbala province. His father was in prison, wrongfully convicted of embezzlement, and he and his mother and siblings were reduced to a small rented house in Kerbala with no electricity or running water. For such a lowly family, his was an extraordinary achievement. Hassan was awarded the fortune of twenty dinars for his scholarly success and his picture was taken for the local paper. He went to Baghdad to enroll in the university.

  At six in the morning on 17 July Hassan woke up to the sound of gunfire cracking. He was staying in a hostel off Rashid Street and went out into the ocher summer dawn and asked the pavement sellers setting up for the day what had happened. The defense ministry was a few streets away, they pointed.

  “Another coup,” said one, shrugging his shoulders.

  “A coup? Do you think they will block the roads?” Hassan was mindful of the scant three banknotes in his pocket. He had planned to return to Kerbala that day; he did not have enough money for a longer stay.

  He went back to his hostel and drank a glass of tea and listened to the radio. General Aref was finished, that much was obvious, but it was not clear who was now in control. At seven-thirty the radio issued Proclamation Number One. Various promises were made to deal with the Kurdish problem, Palestinian guerrillas, the righting of the military catastrophe against the Jews the previous year, the rule of law, equal opportunities and “a democratic life.” More flowery rhetoric was reserved for the denunciation of the regime which had just been deposed: “a clique of ignoramuses, illiterates, profit-seekers, thieves, spies, Zionists, suspects and agents.” On the streets, Dr. Hassan recalled, no one paid much attention; there had been so many coups and generals and presidents since the murder of the King in 1958. Political fervor boiled with Arab pride, the injustice of Palestine and the indignity of British imperialism. A swirl of ideologies, the Communist current and the nationalist current and the Baath Party current each flowed faster and faster as if it were a race. The Baathie revolution of 1968 was expected and came, calmly, like a break in the weather, as if in answer to the turmoil. The lanes under the crumbling balconies of the old Ottoman quarter were noisy with hawkers and sellers going about their business as usual. Hassan noticed a girl walking past with her head uncovered and wearing a skirt that showed her legs. All the barrow-men and the porters, the tea hawkers, the traffic policeman with the whistle in his mouth, an old man on a mule, watched her progress, but the girl, carrying a satchel of university textbooks, seemed to regard their lusty interest contemptuously. These were modern times and what did she care for the backwardness of the dirty lower strata? Another revolution! Progress! What did this all mean for the common man? Not much, a shoulder shrug of indifference. That day Hassan felt no ominous portent, there were no roadblocks or curfews after all, he traveled back to Kerbala in the afternoon without incident.

  HASSAN JOINED THE Medical Faculty at Baghdad University but after two terms it was clear he could not afford to continue without joining the army for sponsorship, and in order to take up his commission, Hassan was told he had to join the Baath Party.

  Politics were still in turmoil. On campus there were many parties: Nasserites, Leftists, Muslim Brotherhood, Progressive Socialist Workers, Islamic factions; it was a dangerous mix of popular struggle and force, strikes, arson and rallies, counterplot and propaganda, denunciations, arrests, gunfire and assassination. Students were taken out of exam rooms and never seen again; Dr. Hassan remembered a young Baathie student leader called Ayad Allawi who liked to brandish his pistol—it was a revolution after all—at communists when fights broke out in the Student Club. From time to time, government cars were bombed.

  His father warned him against getting mixed up in politics, but Hassan filled in the application form without much misgiving, signed his name to a dictated paragraph declaring the socialist and Arab nationalist principles of Baathism and went to the weekly meetings as required.

  Dredging this history in Abu Dhabi, one question echoed in my head: Didn’t you know? Didn’t you know? I was hoping to elicit the very first pricks of misgiving, things he had seen which bothered him, a disquiet, at least concern—the telephone rang. Dr. Hassan turned away from me and took the call.

  Dr. Hassan put the telephone down and smiled. He resumed his chronology. In January 1969 he and the other Baathie students were ordered to Tahrir Square (“Come and enjoy the feast!” exhorted the radio), where fourteen prisoners, nine of them Jews, were to be publicly hanged as Zionist traitors. The Baath Party, insecure in their tenure, young, nascent, then just another regime in a series of overthrowing coups, was showing its boots and its bite. The chants swelled in the throats of a hundred thousand people crowded under the swinging cadavers. “Death to traitors!” “Death to Israel!”

  “What did you think, standing there?”

  Dr. Hassan did not excuse himself, but neither did he berate himself. Those executed were spies, they had been convicted of working against the revolution; these were the consequences.

  “There was no concept of democrac
y, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, the rights of an individual. We didn’t feel these things, we didn’t think these things, we didn’t have any practice of them. I came from a religious town where you could never give your frank opinion. No one had ever been able to speak freely, contradict or question the prevailing order, or especially any kind of religious institution. There was no discussion of these things, life simply was, and was organized already. We did not feel mercy or pity for those Jewish spies who were hanged. We didn’t know the reality, that they were innocent, that they had been tortured. People were shouting, ‘Death to the spies!’ OK, we shouted, ‘Death to the spies!’”

  In 1974 there was another coup attempt in Baghdad. Hassan and his Baathie cadre at the University were issued with rifles and sent to defend the Ministry of Defense. He waited, with his hands sweating around the wooden stock of the gun, for an attack. He thought, What, for the sake of Allah, am I doing here? (In the retelling his knees began to vibrate gently—a minor tremor, some latent nerve?) He admitted that he thought to himself, squatting next to a sandbag with the grit and rubble under his newly issued, heel-cracking black army boots, This is trouble, this is trouble that we might get hurt or killed in and we cannot get out of this trouble.

  BY 1983 DR. Hassan was a major in the army medical corps with a successful private practice. He dressed well and liked Italian shoes, he bought a new car every year and rented a house where he and his friends could gather for parties, a place to bring their girlfriends and drink and relax. He was comfortable, confident, proud of himself, he had rank and respect and money.

  Three days a week he saw patients at the Rashid Military Hospital. After the retreat from Mohamara, he noticed an influx of psychological casualties, shell shock, shaking, hysterical paralysis on the right, gun-holding side of the body. He began to notice waves of malingerers that coincided with each heavy assault. Gunshot wounds to the hands or feet, self-inflicted broken arms; soldiers would inject petrol into the backs of their hands and their flesh would swell and erupt like a volcano, seeping, horrendous, accompanied by a fever. The Military Amn ordered the doctors to send these deserters to prison after they were treated. The usual sentence was five to seven years, but psychiatrists like Dr. Hassan would often write “under tension” on their files and send them back to their units. Often he helped his friends out; he would write sick notes for officers, especially if there was a big attack coming up, or he would make a false medical report, “mentally depressed, unfit for service,” so that eighteen-year-olds could avoid conscription. He felt sorry for them, Sunni and Shia alike, young men faced with the meat grinder of the war; he did what he could to help them avoid the front line.