The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  Then one day, a friend of his disappeared. Dr. Hassan asked around discreetly, confidentially; no one knew—then another friend disappeared. Both were, like him, Shia from the shrine city of Kerbala, like him, they had done well in their studies and joined the Baath Party and progressed into good jobs in Baghdad. Dr. Hassan felt a cold chill and self-diagnosed anxiety. A colleague of his, Dr. Laith, confirmed in a corridor whisper, yes, his friends had been arrested. Dr. Hassan took sleeping pills and he dreamed about leaving the country but dared not apply for an exit visa. He regretted returning to Iraq after his training in Munich, but he had had no choice, now it was too late. He thought: I should hide, but everywhere they will find me.

  One January morning he received a letter requesting him to report for an interview at the Military Amn. He put on his olive green combat dress and a fur-lined fatigue jacket to guard against the cold. He sewed 200 tablets of temazepan and Valium into the collar of his shirt and the waistband of his trousers and put only a little money and his military ID card in his pocket. He took a taxi to the Amn office instead of driving his own car; he knew he would not be returning.

  Dr. Hassan presented himself for arrest. They pulled off the badge of rank from his shoulder and took his watch, blindfolded and handcuffed him and transferred him, by black windowed minivan, to the Military Amn headquarters. His head was forced forward so that he had to walk bent over with his torso parallel to the ground and he was led along an underground corridor and down seven concrete steps and pushed into a cell. The cell had a cement floor, a solid metal door with a window slot and a dirty mattress; but it had been newly painted. A single light bulb burned brightly and continuously and the buzzing blades of a ventilator fan, irregular white noise, drove him half mad with tinnitus. Twice a day, at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., there was a toilet break, the cell doors were opened and the prisoners had to run through the corridor, herded and slapped by guards wielding cables. For three days he remained alone, lying drugged and slothful, abandoned to his own mind. He remembered twenty years before, visiting his father in prison, he remembered that injustice—now repeated! He remembered how proud his father had been when he had achieved the highest high school marks in the whole Province of Kerbala, he had waved the telegram at everyone in prison and they had all given thanks to Allah, that he, an unlucky man, had such a son. Such a son! Dr. Hassan opened his eyes but the white walls bounced cruel electric light and he closed them again into a red interior. In prison, in this country of prisons! His memories came in waves of regret. He recalled the shape of the woman he had loved in Munich under his hands and the bright green spring trees along the boulevards—why had he ever returned to Iraq? He rued and kicked at his decisions—he should have known—and his mind rewound to his duties as a junior doctor attending to prisoners during the war against the Kurds in 1974: lacerations, lesions, swellings, bruises, black eyes, septicemia, infections, toxemia, renal complications, nails extracted, one or more, sometimes all ten, third degree burns on the fingertips due to applied electricity. At night he could hear screaming and sobbing, he ate his Valium and drove himself crazy calculating what his friends might have said under interrogation, what he should say, what he would be compelled to say.

  After three days they woke him at 3 a.m., handcuffed and dragged him, bent over, down the corridor. Up the seven steps, outside, a five minute walk, it was dank and cold, then inside again. They sat him on a stool. They kept him blindfolded but he had the impression that it was an old stone vault with blank walls. He could hear two guards at the door while two other officers paced back and forth and questioned him.

  “Look, we know everything about you. You are a member of the Dawa Party. You and your Shia friends have been gathering for political purposes. Your friends have confessed everything and you have been arrested. You must tell us the truth. There is no point in lying so that we have to behave harshly with you.” The words Dawa Party terrified Dr. Hassan, as their shadow terrified all Shia at that time. Dr. Hassan protested that he had nothing to do with the Dawa, that he was not even a religious man, that he drank alcohol and did not go to the mosque.

  A voice nearby screamed in agonized pain, crying, “No! No! Stop! Don’t—”

  Something about the quality of the sound made Dr. Hassan think it was a recording played to frighten him. He repeated his innocence but it was irrelevant and the beating began. They used thick electrical cables and hit him on his legs and his back. At first the pain was excruciating but after the first blows the stabs of pain slackened, the anxiety of waiting was over, it was already the worst, and his assaulted body pumped blood and adrenaline which mixed with the tranquilizers he had taken; he became dizzy and disoriented, almost drowsy. He felt his body slipping and he did not stop himself falling off the chair. He collapsed on the floor, trussed and aching, his mind black, feigning black-out. The guards rushed over, worried that they had killed him. He knew if he died it meant a problem for them, forms to fill, an investigation—“Help him, help him!” He could hear real concern in their voices. A doctor’s assistant came and took his blood pressure and he was taken back to the cell. He was interrogated twice more, again in the middle of the night, eventually he signed a statement admitting his relationship to his arrested friends, but he was not beaten again.

  In Abu Dhabi he paused and he leaned back in his chair and put his hands together and pressed his supplication to memory against the bridge of his nose. “I was like my patients, I was like those soldiers who exaggerate their wounds so that they do not have to return to the front.”

  His case was transferred to the National Security Council, the authority that judged crimes concerning the security of the regime. His parents, meanwhile, had paid $20,000 to engage a lawyer because his brother was the Chief of Military Intelligence. His friend Dr. Laith gave a statement on his behalf, asserting that Dr. Hassan was a good man and had never had anything to do with the Dawa Party. In the end he was charged with drinking alcohol in uniform, having improper relations with the nurses at the Rashid hospital and helping Shia soldiers avoid their duty at the front by signing sick leave for them. After three months he was transferred to al Rashid No. 1 Prison, officers’ section. His cell mate was Lieutenant Colonel Kamel Sachet.

  PHOTOGRAPH: A portrait taken of Kamel Sachet in prison. He has a full beard and his eyes are hooded and recessed into charcoal shadows, his expression slow burning in anger, defiance and fatigue.

  Kamel Sachet used to fall asleep instantly, like a switch being flipped. “You could not count to five before he would be asleep.” Dr. Hassan suffered insomnia, and would ask him, incredulous, “How can you sleep so easily? Are we in the Hilton or something?” Kamel Sachet said he always slept like a stone, even on battlefields under bombardment.

  Dr. Hassan knew of his reputation. He had seen the television pictures of Saddam awarding his Special Forces commander with medals, he had read the story of Kamel Sachet, brazen with courage, wearing the full uniform of an Iraqi Special Forces lieutenant colonel, walking tall through the front gate of an Iranian garrison, raising his arm as if to return the stupefied salute of the guards before shooting them: a Trojan horse for his men to run in behind.

  Conditions in the officers’ section of the al-Rashid military prison were reasonable. Dr. Hassan and Kamel Sachet shared a room with a window, the door was not locked at night and they had free access to a bathroom. Outside there was a stretch of open ground, a volleyball court, a patch of scrub and a few plants. Some of the officers laid out small gardens and grew vegetables to pass the time. They were allowed to read the Koran and other books were also sometimes permitted, they had a radio but no newspapers. There were fifty prisoners in the senior officers’ section (after Mohamara, Saddam would brook no dissent), among them three divisional commanders, the chief of food procurement for the army who was accused of fraud and the military attaché from the Iraqi Embassy in India who had created a diplomatic incident by hunting holy birds.

  In the mornings Kamel Sachet trie
d to involve his new friend in volleyball to keep his strength up, in the afternoons they would walk together, pace the dirt between the barbed wire fences, as Kamel Sachet practiced pronouncing the foreign English words he had asked Dr. Hassan to teach him. They talked together, they confided their recovering trauma to each other. Kamel Sachet told Dr. Hassan that he had been kept for three months in a cell too small for him to stand up or lie down in. His interrogators had not beaten him, perhaps his natural authority abated their usual brutality, but he was not allowed to wash. He said his uniform became like “dirty sand,” his beard grew long and matted. “I should not have said that thing on the telephone,” he once admitted.

  During interrogation he was asked why he was not a member of the Baath Party.

  He replied, “I am an officer in the army; the army has no relations with the Baath Party, it is not necessary to be a member.” They asked him why he had criticized the order to withdraw from Mohamara. Kamel Sachet was not penitent. “That territory cost us too much blood that we should let it go so easily.”

  He asked Dr. Hassan to help him write a letter of petition to Saddam asking that his case be brought before a court. The letter was conveyed through some sympathetic connections. Kamel Sachet had not yet been charged and chafed at the pace of the investigation; but he maintained his trust in God and the President. He was, as ever, servant to his duty.

  All the senior officers had been transferred to al-Rashid No. 1 Prison after weeks of interrogation, being beaten, chained, kept locked up, solitary in their own filth, but they never spoke of these humiliations. If Dr. Hassan asked one of them what had happened, he would shrug and say he had done nothing and walk away. Their pride bit their tongues, they recoiled from their shame. “Suspicion was the dominant behavior”; informers were ostracized. The uncertainty of their investigations lingered over the camp; Dr. Hassan noted depression and paranoia. Some obsessively pulled whiskers from their cheeks one by one.

  Most of the officers prayed, it was an old consoling rhythm and observance that broke the day into manageable pieces of time. They prayed and rubbed their prayer beads through their fingers: solace, false piety, hope. “It’s a defense mechanism,” Dr. Hassan told me. “The stress of the situation draws you back to the unconscious point of religion and its secrets.”

  Kamel Sachet’s observance was diligent. He prayed five times a day and spent the evenings reciting passages from the Koran. It was his dearest ambition to commit the entire knowledge of the Koran to memory; he often told Dr. Hassan he wished he had learned the Koran when he was young and his mind more impressionable for the imprint of the verses. He asked him to pray with him, but Dr. Hassan demurred. He had his Valium instead. “It is because you are a Shia,” lamented Kamel Sachet. He wished Dr. Hassan was not Shia. He told him sadly, almost with regret, “You are my best friend but it is wrong that you visit these shrines and pray to those imams.”

  Kamel Sachet submitted to Islamic fatalism: “What is written on my forehead is written by God for me.” In battle he always held his head up, eschewing a helmet, wearing only a beret, and led his men from the front. Many times, he recounted, he had heard the bullets whistle close to him, sometimes so close they burned his tunic, but he never wavered. “If I die at that moment then it means that is the time for me to die.”

  Dr. Hassan found his certainty unnerving, almost supernatural. Kamel Sachet’s self-belief was rock. He was the champion marksman of the whole army. “I never miss a bullet.”

  “If you become afraid, you have lost the battle.” he explained. “You have to think what your enemy is thinking. What would your enemy expect? They would not expect an Iraqi officer to walk alone with his head held up straight through their gates!”

  War is psychology, Dr. Hassan agreed. He told Kamel Sachet how he had once managed to persuade a captured Iranian fighter pilot to broadcast a short statement on Iraqi television. “I befriended him.” He told him how he had devised propaganda leaflets to drop over the Iranian trenches. Kamel Sachet was impressed and surprised by Dr. Hassan’s world of psychiatry. He said, “I know the other commanders don’t understand you, but we need more of you.” He concurred that men were better rewarded than punished. He himself commanded loyalty with good treatment. He always made sure his men had enough rations, that their boots were the best available—there were some commanders who stole their units’ meat and front line soldiers were left to subsist on rice and soup. Dr. Hassan nodded at these things, he had visited the front and reported on morale. He said he had seen a platoon with only a single chicken between them every two weeks because the thieves in the commissary sold what was requisitioned.

  “In Mohamara,” Kamel Sachet pronounced with pride, “I treated wounded Iranian prisoners as if they were my own sons and I punished those of my own men who were looters and rapists.”

  They talked over many long weeks. They discussed command and psychological warfare, authority and its exercise, they talked about their families and their lives before. Dr. Hassan told Kamel Sachet about his time in Munich and the easy interaction between European men and women, without shame! “Shamelessness!” Kamel Sachet told Dr. Hassan that he had been attached to the vice squad when he was in the police, and had witnessed the corruption of alcohol, the self-degradation of women, the effects of sexual assault, such stains that could never be erased—he shook his head. Dr. Hassan told him that he had tried to counsel victims of rape. Kamel Sachet narrowed his eyes and shook his head again, for him, death was the only sanction.

  They did not talk about the regime. They did not talk about Saddam. Kamel Sachet remained steadfast in his loyalty, commanded by President, father, sheikh or God, the requirement of his duty was the same. A general’s great glory, enshrined in the Koran and Islamic conquest folklore, was obedience to his ruler. “Who by God obeys God and his Prophet and those in command of your affairs,” quoted Kamel Sachet. His country was at war, the Iranians were the same Persian enemy that the great Kaakaa had destroyed, morphed into the Shia revolution of aggression and apostasy. His world was sharply divided into black and white, he was not a political man; he never navigated; he stood clearly upright, called in no favors, reasoned with his interrogators, spoke with confidence, without guilt, and tried to benefit from his imprisonment by learning English, studying the Koran and understanding the new world of psychology that Dr. Hassan had explained to him.

  In contrast, Dr. Hassan lost twenty kilos in his three months of isolation. He imploded, his soul gnawed at itself, pride collapsed. He was caught in a paradox: his rank and party membership had not insured him against arrest and yet his position had mitigated his charges and allotted him a decent prison. Sometimes he saw it all as an overturned game, it didn’t matter to them what your credentials were or your position or merit. There were no rights, no right. It was a game of control but he saw that it had no rules. He had tried to follow the rules but he had been punished anyway. In prison his friendship with Kamel Sachet kept his spirits up and rebuilt some of his confidence but when he was eventually released after several months, this thin defense crumbled again. He went back to work at the Rashid Military Hospital, but he felt alienated. His colleagues distanced themselves and, like magnets repelling, he withdrew. For several months he was repeatedly called back to court as various aspects of his case came up for processing. He wanted to explain to his colleagues that in the end he had only faced the minor formal charge of drinking in uniform; but he worried that they would not believe him. He was marked Shia, they were Sunni, they took care not to be included in his circle of suspicion. Before his arrest Dr. Hassan had been a confident extrovert, afterward he became quiet, lone and pensive. His Shia friends, who had also been arrested, came to see him once or twice at his clinic, but they did not dare to renew their friendships. The shadow of his dislocation was cold, but it was a place to hide. Over time this chill internal discomfort permeated his bones. Dr. Hassan said he never really recovered his old self. The moments of a smile, a small laugh that
I saw, belied geniality, but he carried a weight of a life unlived, a handicap of circumscription. Abu Dhabi exile was no respite; it was a reduction, not an escape.

  Kamel Sachet was released without charge a few weeks after Dr. Hassan. He had been at home with his family only a day or two when he was summoned to Saddam’s presence. Saddam gave him money and another decoration and promoted him to full Colonel in charge of his own division. This was the recalibration of loyalty. Good patriotism could not be trusted, Saddam knew very well—he preferred rod and reward, the example of stripped and banished, followed by the prodigal relief of re-admittance. He created slaves and henchmen in one mind.

  A MONTH AFTER his release Dr. Hassan was sent to attend an execution at a military training compound in the desert south of Baghdad. It was unusual for a psychiatrist to be assigned to such duty, but he could not refuse the order. Six young men, fit and healthy, were tied to stakes. Their sentence of death for desertion was read out to them. Six soldiers lined up opposite, each was given thirty bullets for his task. Their platoon commander stood to one side flanked by Dr. Hassan and a religious sheikh who had also been summoned.