by Roy Scranton
“But I did!”
“No, listen. Do you see the angels?”
Qasim looked to the sky, where indeed he saw the angels his father spoke of. “Yes.”
“They have come to burn all this away.”
“Like the chemotherapy?”
Faruq lay on the ground. “Like the wind. Listen.”
Qasim listened, but all he could hear was his father’s respirator and the beep of the EKG. He seemed so old, so wasted, lying there in the hospital bed. It was as if some evil spirit had sucked all the meat from his body except the stringy cord of his soul. Faruq watched him but couldn’t speak because of the oxygen mask. His eyes were pale and bloodshot, stern and piercing.
Mohammed stood smoking next to the bed. “You see, boy,” he said. “You see what life is? This is the recitation.”
“There’s more,” Qasim said.
“This is all there is.”
“There’s more. There’s more if I can find it.”
Mohammed inhaled on his cigarette, covering Faruq’s face with the sheet. “That was his mistake,” Mohammed said. “He tricked you. Now you’ve killed him for it.”
“There is more.”
“Look,” Mohammed said, pointing down the hospital corridor. A pack of dogs ran at them. “Stand!” Mohammed shouted.
Qasim turned and ran. Yet it seemed no matter how hard he pumped his legs, he couldn’t move, and the dogs, impossibly slowly, gained by inches, their jaws snapping at his calves. His heart pounded, and he felt their paws on his back, slamming him down, their breath on his neck, their teeth.
Day and night, bombs crashed into Baghdad. You watched it on TV, you heard it on the radio, you saw it from the roof and when you ventured out into the street: soldiers and civilians, arms and legs roasting, broken by falling stone, intestines spilling onto concrete; homes and barracks, walls ripped open; Baathists and Islamists, Communists and Social Democrats, grocers, tailors, construction workers, nurses, teachers all scurrying to hide in dim burrows, where they would wait to die, as many died, some slowly from disease and infection, others quick in bursts of light, thickets of tumbling steel, halos of dust, crushed by the world’s greatest army.
As the bombing grew worse, the terror of it stained every living moment. Sleep was a fractured nightmare of the day before, cut short by another raid. Stillness and quiet didn’t mean peace, only more hours of anxious waiting—or death. Even the comfort of family rubbed raw.
Maha sat in her room listening to Britney Spears and Brandy, wishing she was anywhere else. This war was going to ruin her life, she knew it, it was going to ruin her chances for marriage, it was going to ruin everything. Her skin was breaking out, her hair frizzing, ends splitting. She stood at her window and gazed through the slit between the two pieces of plywood nailed over the glass and watched smoke drift over her city, and the smoke was her future fading to haze. She started hitting Nazahah, hard. She hated how her sister kept praying, stupid praying to stupid God, like it would do anything. She hated her mother and father, her sick cousin Qasim, whom she had to keep nursing, creepy old Othman, her sisters. She hated her mother’s patience and stillness. She hated Warda’s incessant singing and Khalida’s watchful eyes. They were all conspiring against her: none of them understood how terrible it was to have her life ruined at seventeen, before she was married, before she’d even fallen in love. She stood at her window and gazed through the slit between the two pieces of wood and watched flames burn along the skyline, half hoping she’d see it all devoured.
More bombs fell on the city. Day and night, smoke clouded the sky and the sun blazed like blood. Sometimes air-raid sirens would break the heavens with wailing and all across the city people would drop what they were doing and hide. Then the sirens would subside and no bombs would fall. Then the all-clear would sound, or not, while AA guns hacked at the empty gray. What people grew to depend on was the mosque. After every bombing, out from the many minarets across the city the muezzin would sound: Allahu akbar, la ilaha illallah. And more bombs fell on the city.
Warda kept herself busy. She could not bear to be still: as soon as she stopped moving, her mind bloomed with grim thoughts of her husband and her boys. She could not bear to think of her little Siraj lifeless and torn, or Abdul-Majid, who cried and fussed so much, falling quiet forever—it was an emptiness the depths of which Warda refused to peer into. To lose her beloved Ratib, whose skin she adored, whose hips and back and shoulders she clung to, whose lips and cheeks and eyebrows she loved so dearly they made her ache, after all their struggles, would be losing the world. So she mended. She cleaned. She baked. She’d watch movies sometimes with the family, a little, but her mind wandered and after a few minutes she’d get up and find something else to do. She reorganized the kitchen and the closets. She dusted behind the TV.
And she sang. Quietly, songs from her childhood, in a soft and lilting voice that sounded through the house, soothing the family. They couldn’t see the horror behind her gentle eyes, couldn’t hear how her songs were only noise to hush an endless silence, so they were calmed by them, and this in turn helped calm Warda. So she kept singing. And sometimes, as she sang, she could even imagine a future. She might go back to work for the Ministry of Trade, where she’d worked before Abdul-Majid had been born. She might vote. She might grow old with Ratib, watch her sons become men, watch them go to college, have careers and wives of their own. She might live to see her grandchildren born.
And more bombs fell on the city. Bread prices doubled, tripled, quadrupled. There was no propane. There was no benzine. The satellite went in and out and eventually Iraq TV shut down, but the radio still played patriotic songs and reports of the Americans’ defeat. When they could, they watched CNN or Al Jazeera. They watched balls of fire rise up in the night across the Dijlah, red and gold flowers blooming in the black water. They saw their city in green from above, in videos made by the men who were killing them, bright neon stripes cutting the screen, pale green explosions below.
They watched TV reporters in Kuwait, Qatar, and Israel put on gas masks. They watched American tanks push across their desert. They watched Iraqi soldiers surrender. They watched Iraqi soldiers die. They watched their brothers and husbands and sons forced to their knees and thrown like trash into the backs of trucks, blindfolded and hog-tied. On Al Jazeera, they saw children in rubble, ruptured bodies leaking like cracked pomegranates. On CNN they saw generals pointing at big maps full of arrows. Allahu akbar, cried the muezzin, la ilaha illallah. And more bombs fell.
Nazahah prayed. She bore the abuse of her sister, the discomforts when there was no light, no electricity, or no water, she bore the tremor of fear, she bore it all, praying constantly to God and the Prophet, to Khadija, the Prophet’s wife, to Fatimah, the Prophet’s daughter, and to Michael Jackson. God was testing them, just as he’d tested the Prophet, and she would show him her heart’s recitation. So devout in her prayer was she that her absent-mindedness grew worse than ever. She let the kettle boil over. She burned bread. She forgot to give Qasim his antibiotic. She swept up the kitchen and left a small tidy pile of dirt in the middle of the floor. Her mother chided her. Khalida snapped at her. Maha hit her. And Nazahah prayed for forgiveness and mercy. She prayed to be less absent-minded. She prayed for God to make her eyebrows less bushy. She prayed for God to keep them all safe.
It was hard with all the fear in the house to feel the nearness of God. More and more, she spent her time alone, writing out prayers on slips of paper, reading the Qur’an and books on the Sira and the Hadith, and a book from the seventies about pan-Islamism. She drew secret pictures of the Prophet and Michael Jackson riding together on Buraq, the white, winged, woman-faced horse that carried the Prophet on the Isra and Miraj. She pictured the Prophet and Michael Jackson walking together in the desert, holding hands, Fatimah (looking suspiciously like Nazahah herself) walking behind them. She imagined they spoke together of the
jagged beauty of palm trees and the buzz of bees, the way honey dripped clear and gold on flatbread, her father’s smell when he’d been smoking—and of how the purity of God’s mercy would conquer all, how great God was to have given us such a world, with red tomatoes and green reeds and the great brown Dijlah, the wonder of the muezzin’s call and the glory of “Thriller,” the perfection of breakfast at breakfast time, tea at teatime, and bed at bedtime. Nazahah prayed in ecstasies of gratitude that she was alive and that God had made the world and that the world was so perfect and full.
And more bombs fell. The lights went out. The electricity went out. The water stopped running. It came back on. It shut off again. They began to leave candles everywhere, and matches. They went to bed just after sundown, even though they knew they wouldn’t sleep through the night, and arose at dawn, lethargic and anxious from the night’s thundering bombardments. There was nothing else to do, with the power off and on, but lie in their misery and fear. Allahu akbar, cried the muezzin, la ilaha illallah. Day and night, bombs, rockets, and missiles crashed down into Baghdad, erupting in plumes of smoke, strewing metal and the screaming wounded. And they watched CNN, Al Jazeera, and the BBC. And they saw their city burning. They watched their husbands, sons, and brothers shot, captured, shamed, dishonored. They watched Umm Qasr fall. They watched Basra fall. They watched an-Nasiriyah fall. They watched Karbala fall. They huddled around a map, listening to the rumors on the news, trying to see how far the Americans had come.
Thurayya was calm and patient, the burden of her family a gratifying weight. She was their center, their mother. She made sure the men went to get bread, the generator was full of benzine, and the house clean and orderly and quiet. She was confident and assured, as if all her life she’d worked toward this moment, to take the family in hand and guide them through these hours of danger while the world outside was consumed in flames. She had what she needed, she had what she loved, and she would sustain them. She baked flatbread and made dinner. She told Maha to sweep and Abdul-Majid to wash his face. She leaned against her husband’s broad back and felt his skin on her hands, and was happy knowing he was a brave, good man and that after the war passed, he would go out as he had the last time and rebuild their lives yet again. She had him here, now, and she lay with him at night in the darkness and was not afraid.
It wasn’t like last time, when her daughters were still children and Mohammed was away, called up in the reserves. When she couldn’t sleep at night for fear that he would die and she wouldn’t even know. When her nightmares had woken the children and her days were a torment of waiting. She and her daughters had stayed with her mother, still alive then but deathly sick, in a tiny back room in her brother’s house. She could still sometimes smell the stench of her mother’s illness—it shamed her to think of, shamed her that she hadn’t been strong enough for both her mother and her daughters at the same time. But all she could do back then was wait, pray, write her husband, and keep busy. Sometimes she would shake so hard from fear her teeth chattered—not for herself, not even for her daughters, but for Mohammed. Every night she prayed for him to live. Every day she prepared herself for his death.
When he came back, she vowed never to let him leave her, and he hadn’t. He never took a business trip that kept him away more than one night. One night they could be apart, but no more. She wouldn’t allow it. She had him. She had her home. She was in her home, with her husband and her daughters and her sister, and all would be well. They could go through a hundred bombings and a thousand tribulations, and she would stand strong and guide her household with a firm and loving hand. Mohammed was there and she was strong. She was full of love and forbearance for all, even her son-in-law Ratib, even her no-good runt nephew Qasim, who was, under her care, healing, fighting off the infection, growing stronger—he could eat solid foods now and even sit up and read. She was motherly even with Othman, toward whom she had always been polite but distant, for reasons she refused to think about too much but had to do with the sparkle in the old poet’s eye. She gathered the household in her hands and set it to order. Even Maha, even Khalida she took in hand and set to work. There was chaos outside, but her family, her girls and her men, would sustain.
More bombs fell. There were rumors the Americans were coming from the east. From the west. From the south. They’d taken the Karbala Gap. They hadn’t taken the Karbala Gap. They were in Baghdad. They weren’t in Baghdad. The city choked on smog and explosions, lies and ash. The power went out for good, phones and water too. They ran the TV on the generator. The satellite came and went. They passed rumors from their neighbors at nighttime and rumors from their dreams at dawn. They began to hear artillery fire, big guns and mortars, distant thumps and nearer crashes.
One night, the Hizbis all left. The trenches and guard points around the city emptied, leaving ghost uniforms and boots and helmets, as if the men had evaporated where they stood. There were rumors US Marines had been seen in Al-Rusafa, on the east side of the Dijlah. Rumors the Kadhimaya Mosque had been bombed by stealth jets. Rumors Saddam had ordered the Fedayeen underground. Rumors Saddam was dead.
Suddenly, tanks in the streets. Humvees running down the avenues, heavy guns lobbing explosive rounds at houses and shadows. Rifles, machine guns, now the chatter of small-arms fire peppered their days and nights.
They quit going out. They locked the gate. They spoke to their neighbors through a crack in the second-story window. They didn’t go onto the roof. More explosions, more shooting. One night they listened to a tank roll down their street. They heard it stop. They heard the whine of its turret and heard its gun fire, the sound of hell cracking open, then again, feeling it throb in their bellies, knees, and thumbs. They bowed their heads and prayed. Allahu akbar, la ilaha illallah. They heard a machine gun go tock-tock-tock, then the tank rolled away. It’s target had been an empty house. Two gaping holes like blank eye sockets watched the street.
And more bombs fell. Allahu akbar, cried the muezzin, la ilaha illallah.
The blind man sat listening to the thunder, rubbing the stub of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. It was late. “Ah-ham,” he muttered.
Trouble had come again, as it had before and before and before. He remembered the British biplanes of his youth, when he’d first joined the army, the way you could hear the click of the bomb releasing—poisonous gray eggs tumbling into the Kurdish lines. And then . . . He remembered the Tommies in their pointy helmets, marching the road to Baghdad. Before them, the Turk—but he could only faintly summon the Turk. Until the Revolt and the Great War, the press of world events had seemed distant.
There was so much to remember, so much to recall. So much to see and know and feel, so many dead to hold on to. So many dead. Even one life was too full. Even one life was so long and bloody, he could hardly bear it.
But that’s what the poem was for. It was all there, his first love and his last, his long-dead father and long-lost sons, the fall of Baghdad and the coup d’état, the many revolutions. He remembered Mohammed al-Sadr’s Independence Guard and the revolt against the British, the bright hope—he was what, fourteen? The shining dream of nation . . . He remembered fighting the Kurds, his years in the army, his wife, young, the late twenties, the days of hope as the people grew slowly to become Iraq—then Independence: 1932. There were celebrations.
We might as well have been mourning, he thought, for all the good it did us.
In the Assyrian revolt, he killed Assyrians. In the Shi’a revolt, he killed Shi’a. He helped protect the Turkish Petroleum Company, then the Iraqi Petroleum Company, as they pumped out the people’s wealth and the people’s oil. A coup, an assassination, another coup, the British returned and occupied Basra, Umm Qasr . . . The collapse, the Farhud, Iraqi Jews blamed and murdered, banished. And then, in 1948, the Catastrophe, the diabolical birth of the Zionist state and the war in Palestine. He led his men through the Jezreel Valley and up the Tell el-Mutesellim, which the Je
ws call Har Megiddo, fighting the Zionists, and many good men died. All for nothing.
It was all written down, and all for nothing. And many years later, when he dared speak his mind, when he dared utter the truth, was he not punished? Saddam had struck him down—but had not killed him, and that was his mistake. For do I not yet write? Do I not mark the truth in my book? Do I not chronicle my poem for the ages, to be sung by my children’s children’s children? They would blind me, but I see the truth. I see the truth and I write the truth, and our truth shall outlive theirs.
He jabbed the stub of his tongue against his teeth and pressed his pen to the blackened page. Another sura remained to be written.
Qasim gathered his strength. He was better now, though his hand was still weak. He’d decided: staying in Baghdad was cowardice. He went to Mohammed and asked to use the Toyota to go home to his wife in Baqubah.
Mohammed was proud but worried. There would be many dangers, not just the Americans. There were looters, Fedayeen—who knew? And where would you get benzine if you needed it? And what would you do if something happened? Qasim agreed that it might be difficult but argued that he should go sooner rather than later. No one knew when, or if, things would settle down. There might never be a better time than now. “I understand,” Mohammed said, “but you’re still healing. Stay a few more days.”
“I’m strong now, Uncle. I’ve waited too long already.”
“Qasim, you’re still weak. You’re not well enough yet. I can’t let you go alone. It’s too dangerous.”
“Uncle, please,” Qasim said, going to one knee before Mohammed at the kitchen table. “I have to go.”
“No. You have to wait. I can’t spare myself or Ratib to take you, and we need the Toyota here. This is more of your foolishness. Wait until things calm down, and we’ll figure something out.”
Othman watched the discussion from the other end of the kitchen, fiddling with his lighter. Then he tapped it loudly on the table. “I’ll go,” he said.