The cul-de-sac logistics driving to and fro, this fraught mission, absorbed Ali’s anger. An hour, two hours passed this way. Finally they went to the house of his father’s sister and found her husband there. Abu Shakur was not a brother of his father, but he was all that could be found and would have to suffice. Abu Shakur was kindly and a little bit old, he carried a venerability, but he was not a close relative. Somehow this made Ali ashamed; the three of them seemed to be an unworthy cortege.
At the main gate of Abu Ghraib the guards would not let them through and told them to turn off the engine and wait. After an interim they were told a car would be sent to collect them. Abu Shakur told Ali to wait in the car, he would go and do the paperwork.
“Stay here, if you come with me, in the state you are in, you will curse the government and they’ll arrest you—”
Abu Shakur was shown into the office of Colonel Hassan. Colonel Hassan greeted him with an expression of regret. He opened his palms (“What could I do?”), then pressed his fingertips together in mock supplication.
Abu Shakur sat stiffly and cut through this false sympathy with a direct ambiguity.
“If Kamel disobeyed an order,” he stated clearly, in full reference and memory of his brother-in-law’s unimpeachable reputation for loyal obedience, “this was his destiny.”
Colonel Hassan looked down at his dirty fingernails and replied, perhaps in an effort of mild justification, “It was for the interests of the country. I hope our God will help you to be patient.”
A form was presented to be signed.
Colonel Hassan asked politely where they intended to bury the body of Kamel Sachet. Abu Shakur told him, in Kuthar, near Hilla, where the family had some land.
Colonel Hassan warned him, “Take the body there and only there and no other place. If you take the body through Baghdad or stop the car in any other place we will take it back from you and bury it ourselves.”
Abu Shakur signed his name.
“A funeral is not permitted,” continued Colonel Hassan, in case he had not made himself perfectly understood. “A gathering of any kind is not permitted.”
Ali was in a state of slow shock and could feel nothing but an emptiness, an awful emptiness swirling with dull rage. Abu Shakur explained that they were not allowed a funeral, Ali nodded. Then they went into the town of Abu Ghraib and hired a taxi with a roof rack for the coffin. It was probably not the first time the taxi driver had been hired for such an errand. His parking place was in the middle of a low row of vegetable sellers next to a restaurant that served rice and kebab to the families of the prisoners who came to visit. Opposite, up a track screened by dusty eucalyptus trees was the place where they buried the executed prisoners whose families did not know they were executed. The bodies were buried in trenches marked with the prisoners’ metal wrist tags stamped with a number. No one ever told the relatives that asked, sometimes, in the restaurant: “What happens when the food and clothing parcels are returned unopened? Is the prisoner transferred? Where?” To Abu Shakur, the driver offered no pleasantries where none were to be had and agreed the fare without much haggling.
The coffin was narrow and made of cheap reused thin wooden boards; gray, plain and without markings. Ali Mishjil pried off the creaking lid and looked inside. The general’s jacket had been laid over his face; he was still wearing his uniform, although it looked dirty and scuffed. For confirmation, Ali Mishjil pulled back the jacket. Ali stood a little way off and waited, hope running into grit. He wanted it not to be true and some terrible mistake, he wanted to hear any thin thread of lie—but Ali Mishjil cried out, screwing fists into his eye sockets, wailing incoherently at God and Ali knew it was him.
It was difficult and awkward, watched by the guards who offered no assistance, to lift the coffin onto the roof of the taxi. Ali and Ali Mishjil, strong with the imperative of the task, hoisted the coffin up. The taxi driver pretended to lift but didn’t put much strength into his effort. As they heaved it up and rested it on the rim of the roof for a moment, Ali saw at eye level through a gap in the planking, a sliver of his father’s naked foot. He recognized the long delicate scar along the ankle, an old familiar shrapnel wound from an attack outside Basra. As the last filament of hope fell soundlessly, he summoned strength from his pain and anger and pushed the dead weight of his father across the roof rack of the scratched up taxi.
They set off followed by an Oldsmobile and a landcruiser, each carrying four Amn officers. A little way out of the gate, the coffin grated dangerously on the roof and they were forced to crawl slowly to the roadside souk in Abu Ghraib where they bought some more rope and tied it down properly. They resumed their journey and took the highway west, stopping in Mahmoudiya, near their destination, to buy perfume with which to anoint the body and lengths of white fabric in which to shroud it for burial.
By this time, delayed and circuitous, it was afternoon prayer time. They went to the mosque at the graveyard and asked for gravediggers and for those who washed the bodies for burial. Abu Shakur attended to these details, Ali stood on the sandy verge and remembered his father walking with him through these very graves. He had told him he wanted to be buried next to his grandfather. Ali crouched in grief, winded by the sound of his father’s voice in his memory, and touched his fingertips to the dust.
He remembered his father teaching him how to shoot. He was nine and his father was commanding a unit in Diala. One of his officers showed him all the different kinds of weapons, put them into his small hands to feel, the barrels, the safety catch, the heft and responsibility, and stood over him while he practiced disassembling a Kalashnikov. In the afternoons sometimes he would be given fifteen bullets to fire at rows of cans. Ali would always ask for more bullets, try to wheedle them out of the bodyguards, sometimes even steal them from his father’s office. He liked to shoot geckos but he was not allowed to; all around was the detritus of battle, old and unexploded ordnance, a stray bullet could hit something and blow it to kingdom come. An orderly hovered to one side and picked up the spent cartridge casings. His father stood behind him, correcting his grip.
“Relax a little,” he would tell him, “hold steady,” “aim carefully,” “no, not like that, place your feet further apart.”
A few men had come to pray but they passed Ali without greeting him and washed their hands at the outside basin, wiping carefully between each finger, sharing a vanishing slip of pink soap, without turning their heads to look behind them.
Ali had wanted to go the Military Academy and train to be an officer. He wanted to be like his father, like those officers his father commanded, respect, loyalty—an expensive pistol on his hip, a Mercedes to drive, or a Toyota Crown, something that carried and conferred status. His father had refused. He told Ali that the army had once been a good place, but not now. Ali had tried to argue, he did not understand, he saw his father with all his medals and decorations, the many people who revered him, visited, petitioned, the many he helped, the daughter of one of his officers killed in battle he had paid to train as a pharmacist, the mosques he had built, the way the ordinary people in Amara had looked to him for protection, like a guardian lord.
His father brushed off his son’s admiration and his ambitions, he told him, bitterly, “Saddam always keeps the people he needs close to him; when they are no longer needed, he ignores them.”
As they waited for prayer to conclude, Ali felt his temper tremble and the inadequacy of this funeral.
Abu Shakur had gone to find the Sachet family plot but he could not locate it. He came back and asked the mosque attendants to find a map of the cemetery.
“Who is this you are burying?” they asked.
“This is Kamel Sachet we have here.”
Then the mosque attendants began to cry and lament, they knew Kamel Sachet, they knew a good man had been killed, they bemoaned Saddam and asked how could such a hero have been executed?
Five cars full of local Amn officers drove up. They parked and the officers pos
itioned themselves on the road and around the mosque. They had been told to keep an eye on the burial of an executed man; they had no idea who was being buried. Adnan Janabi, hearing the news through Janabis in the intelligence network, drove up to pay his respects, no matter the consequences.
The Sachet family plot was found and the gravediggers started to dig in the dusk. The corpse washers laid the body out on a slab over a drain and brought buckets of hot water. Ali came into the mosque to see what was happening but Abu Shakur touched his elbow and led him away, “It’s better that you don’t see this.” Ali demurred, he was afraid to look at his father’s dead face and imprint this as his last memory of him. Through the door to the washing room, which was slightly ajar, he could see the sleeve arm of his father’s uniform, brown with blood, stiff and unnaturally rigid, bent across his chest, and the dried blood between his father’s fingers—a corpse washer came over and drew Abu Shakur to one side. There was a problem, he explained. The body was in a bad state; it had been dead for some time. He paused uncertainly, respectfully. They could not undress him, skin and flesh would peel away stuck to his uniform. The man held out his hands apologetically. For Kamel Sachet, such a man who had built three mosques and kept his prayers, for such a man to be buried unwashed!—He was very sorry about all of it. Presently the imam came over and soothed things.
“No, no, don’t concern yourself, God knows these problems: for a martyr, in these situations—it is not necessary to wash a martyr. Do not worry. If there is any responsibility that needs to be taken, I will be responsible.”
So the corpse washers carefully folded the General’s arms across his chest in death repose and wrapped the body in a shroud. Ali came in when they had finished and put his hand on his father’s white cotton hand.
Final prayers were said. Ali wiped his hands over his face and hung them at his sides, through the reassuring sibilance of prayer, the familiar, the repeated, the cyclical, the continuous, the everlasting certainty. He felt, however, no solace in the promise of paradise.
The chief of the local Amn came over and made inquiries.
“Who is the body?” he asked. He had been told nothing, only that there was a burial that needed to be watched and that no gathering was to be permitted. When he heard the name of Kamel Sachet, the Amn officer inhaled and looked at the ground, coughed at the sudden lump in his throat. As the word spread some of the other Amn officers began crying openly. Ali heard their grief and he let his outrage fly loose at last. He railed, shouting at the sky, at the President, at the men who followed his orders.
The chief of the local Amn took him aside gently, put a sympathetic arm around his shoulders and said, in a kind whisper, “Look, this talk is of no use to you. Be brave as your father was. Go home and take care of your family. This talk will be of no benefit to you.”
Chapter 18
GENERALS IN GENERAL
I SPENT THE SUMMER OF 2007 LOOKING FOR GENERALS and sergeants and anyone who might have known Kamel Sachet. I wanted to hear new stories and overlap and confirm the ones I already knew. Two million or more Iraqis had fled Iraq, mostly to Jordan and Syria, and I spent weeks in Damascus and Amman, sitting in cafés or hotel lobbies or on a thin pallet in a refugee hovel drinking, accordingly, glasses of tea or orange juice, or cans of warm Pepsi.
“And how is your family?” I would ask and then horror stories came out. Everyone, without exception, had a horror story. Kill kidnap kill kidnap kill kidnap. In various permutations: brother, self, wife, five-year-old son; ransomed, shot, missing. They had stopped blaming the Americans; somehow the horror had gone beyond anger or fault. One woman I remember, a modest, educated, English-speaking, handsome woman in a long black abaya. She was Shia married to a Sunni—inter-sect marriage was common in Baghdad—and her husband had been killed in a bombing. During her mourning, her brother-in-law had come to her and threatened to tell the insurgents she was a Shia spy unless she gave her fifteen year old daughter to his son for marriage and took her fourteen year old son out of school to work in his garage. Frightened, she had fled with her children to Damascus, her son was out of school, there was no one to send more money when the little she had ran out. She told me this all quite matter-of-factly, emotion betrayed only by a deep engraved vertical stress line in the middle of her forehead. One story of many, and many worse. My translator had been kidnapped and kept a picture of her dead son hung around her neck. A Scandinavian psychologist who was married to a UN official at the UNHCR told me she didn’t know how to begin to counsel the hundreds of women who had been raped—“hundreds of women raped?” I repeated. She nodded. “Sometimes gang raped. One raped more than eight times in front of her husband! I don’t know how to treat these women”—rape for Iraqis was indelible shame—“and they can’t talk to their families…” Among the women I met there was no theatrical wailing and threshing; the public display of grief that I had known from the early stages of civil war and car bombs in Baghdad had been replaced by a sullen endurance.
In Damascus the displaced Iraqis lived with a little money scraped, dwindling, not much, in small rented apartments in Seyda Zeinab, near the Shia Shrine to the Prophet’s hostage granddaughter, where many Iraqis had settled during the Saddam years, or in the Palestinian areas (another, previous wave of refugees) or in farther, outer suburbs. The apartments were concrete, tiled floor, rolled up mats for bedding, a couple of plastic chairs for visitors, a harsh strip light overhead, a television tuned alternately to MTV and Al Jazeera, a small statuette of the Virgin in the Christian households, a picture of the green mantled Hussein in the Shia, a poster of the ranks of faithful kneeling in prayer rings around the Kaaba in Mecca in the Sunni. Almost everyone complained the rent was high and they couldn’t find a job and the Syrians kept changing their visa criteria and they couldn’t get the new G series Iraqi passports that were only being distributed in Baghdad and money was running out and their children were disrupted from school. They telephoned family members back in Baghdad and Mosul: Was it any better? Was it safe to come home? And heard only news of new bombs and dead relatives.
It was a very dispiriting time. The former officers I found in Damascus were tired and worried. They carried their lives in plastic carrier bags, photocopies of ID cards, military records, birth certificates for their children, house deeds, license details for a car they had sold two years before, letters from the UNHCR, Red Crescent affidavits, registration forms for emigration from the Canadian Embassy. Some of them had been officers in the new Iraqi Army, allied to the Americans, manning checkpoints and operations against insurgents and militias. They had fled firebombing and assassination attempts and hoped (hopelessly, because the Americans were taking very few refugees and even those who had worked directly for them as translators were stranded) to be resettled in the United States and proffered photographs of themselves in uniform standing next to “American Colonel Bob” or “Major Hudson very good man and my good friend” along with certificates of their service and typed letters of recommendation from American commanders.
They sighed and looked over their shoulders to see if there were any listening agents sitting nearby. Often we would see a lone man reading or pretending to read the newspaper and we would have to pay the check and walk down the street to find a park bench or another, more anonymous café. Iraqis were very afraid. The old Baathies were afraid of the Syrian Mukhabarat, a familiar security blanket, which occasionally deported former high rank officers back to Iraq, like throwing morsels as appeasements at the Americans. But more terribly, Iraqis were afraid of each other. The internecine violence was a centrifuge that pulled apart colleagues, neighbors, cousins, scattering families and friends among parties, factions, militias, nefarious business arrangements. Whenever I asked someone for help in asking a friend of theirs to talk to me, they always said, politely, that they would call them first to ask their permission to give me their phone number and often people refused to talk to a Western reporter; who knew who might get to hear of the rend
ezvous or what consequences it might have.
Iraqis were wary of the tensions and threads of war feud that overspilled borders. One former officer in the new Iraqi army told me that three Shia militia thugs had broken his door down at three in the morning and interrogated his pregnant wife as to his whereabouts. Damascus was full of militia bandits and insurgent foot soldiers on R & R for the summer, disgorged with the refugee families from dusty buses into the choking rubbish-ridden lanes around the Shrine of Seyda Zeinab. They adjusted to sleeping without gunfire interruption, went under false names and monikers, calculated the risks and the prices of the people smugglers who promised to get them as far as Greece or Bulgaria and gathered in the hole in the wall cafés, around charcoal braziers grilling kebab, and in airless basement Internet cafés. Sometimes, watching old Iraqi sitcoms from the eighties in the corner of a tea house, catching a refrain of an old Baghdad love song wafting from some open window, they remembered they were all Iraqis again. When the Iraqi national soccer team beat the Saudis (!) in the Asian Cup final, crowds went out into the streets cheering and gunning their motorbikes in lieu of Kalashnikovs until the Syrian police came to quell and beat and remind them where they were.
The Weight of a Mustard Seed Page 22